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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   34538 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 4, 2024

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Nick Fuentes's "your body, my choice" is now apparently on the lips of middle school boys everywhere, if reddit / news sources are to be believed (I'm not around children much). By merely writing this I run the risk of already paying too much attention to a throwaway piece of internet trolling, forgotten by everyone by the time you finish reading this. But given that this taunt has penetrated even my own hitherto groyper-free feeds, and in fact stayed in my mind for a day or two, I wonder if it has some memetic staying power. And I confess that some part of me finds it hilarious. The anti-vaxxers couldn't ruin "my body, my choice", but I feel like this might.

Is this a display of a certain kind of genius for provocation? In rhetoric, we are told not to accept the opponent's framing of a question. And yet here he accepts the opponent's framing of bodily autonomy wholeheartedly, and simply inverts it, ridiculously. Therefore at first it appears the phrase can be dismissed as having no authenticity - a pure troll. No pro-life person would begin their argument by asserting control over of a woman's body. To take the statement at face value and be triggered would surely be to model the opponent incorrectly, to fail the ideological Turning test. Or would it? Ross Douthat isn't about to repeat this slogan, but in the world he wants, doesn't the symbolism of the father walking the bride down the aisle to hand her over have to regain some power? So cue the articles on "MAGA misogyny" and the despair and anger and discussions on how to protect oneself from rape in /r/TwoXChromosomes.

I guess I don't have anything particularly interesting to say about this, but I'm curious what people here think. First, why does it seem that the trolling and triggering in gender discourse is so asymmetric? "No means yes, yes means anal" comes to mind. Are there good examples of the manosphere being successfully provoked in such a manner? You could point to the 4B movement, for instance, but if I'm not mistaken the women declaring celibacy were being earnest, not trolling. Second, is the mainstreaming of 4chan culture, and its exposure to children, important? Or is this just standard fare for schoolyards and male group chats, and no more insidious than, say, the spread of woke ideas in schools?

It's trolling, and trolling designed to validate Democratic views of the nastiness of the other side, further demonstrating that Fuentes is controlled opposition.

That's entirely separate from the fact that the "body autonomy" argument is wholly fake. "Body autonomy" refers abortion and nothing more. Oh, bodily autonomy... so I can take drugs. Marijuana... too easy. Cocaine? Heroin? Testosterone? Penicillin? Oh, that's different is it? OK, then I can choose what medical treatments I have... including vaccination? Including the COVID vax? Ah, different again. Bodily autonomy is a fake argument because in practice nothing else follows from it aside from abortion.

There's nothing nasty about making fun of the people who practice murdering their children so they can continue having careless sex with no consequences.

What does Fuentes being controlled opposition even mean? As you said yourself, "bodily autonomy" arguments are vapid. Laws are made that govern this type of stuff. It' already 'your body, my choice' and it always has been. Why sanctify the democrat crocodile tears by buying into the idea that 'your body, my choice' is a nasty thing to say? Oh, you can't have unprotected sex and then murder a baby to rid yourself of the consequences of your good time? Boohoo.

There's nothing nasty about making fun of the people who practice murdering their children so they can continue having careless sex with no consequences.

Of course not. The nasty thing is agreeing to and promoting their disingenuous framing, as Fuentes did here.

And what framing is that? That the republicans are going to control women's bodies? Isn't that what they are doing?

No more than any government policy controls anyone's body. In fact, the slogan is an extreme red herring on the abortion issue, as it's designed to obscure that another body is involved (the child being murdered).

The unborn child isn't "another body" until you can separate them and the mother and have them both live, or otherwise enact your desire of protecting the child without involving the mother's body in it.

The state claiming ownership of the unborn child is worse than communism, because communism at least claims things that are not parts of pther people's bodies.

the state isn't claiming ownership of the unborn when they say you can't kill them anymore than they claim ownership of any random adult when they say other adults can't murder them

and the state already claims ownership of your own body even if there is no two body problem, from laws against suicide to laws against consumption of drugs, etc.

it is only this issue where we carve out the exception; seriously, the privacy right concoction used in Roe v. Wade is unhelpful to individuals in any other context

Yes, the law against suicide is a violation of self-ownership as well. We just let it slide because killing yourself makes even less sense to most in the first place than killing your unborn child, so few are threatened by the law. Also obligatory "what are they gonna do, arrest my corpse?".

Drugs we ban because no one wants to become a degenerated drug addict, yet people do, so we infer that people need help staying away from drugs. Also, the problem of violent junkies.

But at the end of the day it is only a lizardman's constant who is pro-life on basis of "saving human lives" (and can be argued with about what a human life is and how far should we go saving them). The rest, I assume, are using abortion bans as a tool to enforce their preferred monogamy-for-life-for-the-purposes-of-procreation social model. I see no point arguing. I wish women were as gung-ho as right-wing men about buying guns and chanting "no step on snake".

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No more than any government policy controls anyone's body

That's what I've already said.

In fact, the slogan is an extreme red herring on the abortion issue, as it's designed to obscure that another body is involved (the child being murdered).

If that's what you thought was nasty about it that's fine. I don't think that's what other people found nasty about it though. I mean, do you?

It obviously isn't why leftists are offended, but I do think it's why pro-lifers aren't jumping up to defend him. As for the leftists' offense - that's obviously the intent; it's an act of trolling, but more specifically, it's playacting as the cartoon villain that abortionists want. It's the equivalent of "celebrating" a breakthrough against affirmative action by cackling evilly and going "now we can finally keep the black man down forever".

I have a very hard time believing that you don't understand why this is a nasty thing to say, or why people might interpret it that way. But, taking you at your word, please consider the implications of the phrase in a sexual context.

"Oh, you don't want to have sex? Boohoo"

I'm failing to see the relation. Being unable to have sex without taking responsibility for either contraception or the consequences of unprotected sex are not the same as being forced to have sex.

Sure, and what do you think the implications of the phrase are? In your interpretation, does 'my choice' have a hard limit at exactly the point you think is reasonable to mock (unforced pregnancies) and no further?

If I came up to you and said 'your money, mine now' you would not assume that I meant if you broke a particular clause in a contract that you would be subject to financial penalties. I think the overwhelming interpretation would be 'i control your money in every way'.

Let me ask you this: do you think Fuentes is saying the phrase as a neutral statement of fact, or is he saying it intentionally to rile people up? Maybe that answer goes toward explaining my point. No 'democrat crocodile tears' here.

I think the implication of the phrase is: Abortionists made a big deal about this election being about abortion. Their slogan has long been "my body, my choice". They lost. Fuentes makes fun of them by saying "your body, my choice".

Assuming there's more to it, be that a conspiracy by the federal government to make more women vote democrat, or that Fuentes is actually trying to express his belief that he can rape all women, seems rather far fetched and silly compared to the alternative I just gave.

Let me ask you this: do you think Fuentes is saying the phrase as a neutral statement of fact, or is he saying it intentionally to rile people up? Maybe that answer goes toward explaining my point.

He is obviously saying it to mock and rile people up. Why would that go towards explaining your point?

Why do you insist that every statement has to be 100% serious and taken literally? It can be true simultaneously that he is not expressing a true belief that he has the right to rape all women, but that that is the message he is conveying with this heinous expression.

In fact, you acknowledge that he is saying it to mock people and rile them up. I agree with you. Why do think they're riled?

Do you not think that there is any correlation between saying something explicitly for the purpose of offending people and that thing being a nasty thing to say, especially when you don't believe it literally? I think that goes toward explaining my point quite well.

If you disagree, provide your reasoning about what is a nasty thing to say.

If I came up to you and said 'your money, mine now' you would not assume that I meant if you broke a particular clause in a contract that you would be subject to financial penalties. I think the overwhelming interpretation would be 'i control your money in every way'.

If a libertarian, taxation is theft, guy just lost the presidential race after running on the slogan 'Your money, is yours' and then somebody tweeted 'your money, mine now', I think the overwhelming interpretation of the tweet would be that it is a joke about taxation being theft.

Right, but all the other implications don't suddenly just disappear. The phrase still means what it means. I believe almost everyone would agree that 'your money is yours' has a vaguely positive connotation absent any context, whereas the reverse is true for the 2nd phrase. It might have additional meaning based on the backstory of the presidential race, but the connotations remain.

Wasn’t Fuentes present during Jan 6? And wasn’t he, unlike so many others even less tangentially involved, not charged or imprisoned? This is why people think he glows. Some arrangement was made.

I am sure he is a federal agent in some deep state conspiracy to... do... something? I don't know where the plot goes from there, hence why I asked: What does Fuentes being controlled opposition even mean?

Some arrangement was definitely made and ... Then what happens? Like, the FBI need to pay some guy to be a shock jock on twitter? They put CP on his PC and now he has to do as they say which is... Make fun of zionists, women and democrats?

I don't want to sound too dismissive but I don't know what relevance I should place on the notion that someone is a 'fed'. I mean, can I just refer to Ben Shapiro as Mossad and therefor dismiss everything he says when it inconveniences me somehow? I don't understand the purpose of calling Fuentes a fed otherwise.

I can’t say I have any insight into controlled opposition strategy management. But as far as having a deal with the Feds, what other explanation do we have for his light touch treatment after Jan6?

Fuentes made fun of women after Trump won. Fuentes is also a 'fed'. How should I relate these two things together and why?

The provocation is designed to rally more women to the democrats

so an agent of the federal government dropped him an envelope in the park which said "go after women with this joke"?

no, that's not what happens; what happens is Fuentes flies his derp flag and collects people and then he gives the contact information to the feds of all the suckers which are attracted to the flag

it's why this accusation of "controlled opposition" is such a goofy claim and little more than attack right gatekeeping because the speaker thinks Fuentes&Co. is counterproductive to some of their shared causes

There's nothing nasty about making fun of the people who practice murdering their children so they can continue having careless sex with no consequences.

Yes there is. Nasty is as nasty does.

Visceral, seething hatred is not license to ignore the rules.

90 days this time.

further demonstrating that Fuentes is controlled opposition.

While this seems highly likely to anybody who looks at Fuentes' past stances and actions for more than five minutes, has anyone found any tangible proof of this fact yet?

I find it extremely suspicious that he was standing outside the Capitol with a bullhorn on January 6 yelling at people to storm the building in a way that was clearly criminal incitement, but nothing happened to him. People who did much lesser things that day ended up in federal prison for 10 years, but he’s just fine. Even though he’s someone who should be on the left’s shit list. I think he’s a fed.

There are shades between controlled opposition and uncompromisable crusader for the far right. It is indeed very suspicious that he didn’t go to jail, but it’s probably more likely that he just ratted a bunch of people out and cut a deal than that he’s a full-on federal asset.

There really aren't shades; you can't be a little bit compromised, because the ones who compromised you will use the smallest compromise to force larger ones. Pretty standard asset-recruiting technique.

Most voters, even Democratic voters, don't actually buy the bodily autonomy argument, even for abortion. If you ask if women should be able to abort a day before she's scheduled to give birth, for no reason beyond feeling like it, most will just divert the conversation ("that never happens!") instead of biting the bullet. It's something cooked up in a philosophy journal that works as a convenient one liner.

most will just divert the conversation ("that never happens!") instead of biting the bullet

Or in other words, it's just the distaff/Blue counterpart to this.

The optimal number of murdered children in any society is still not 0 (and literally everyone accepts this- abortion is just more direct about it than others); what you're fighting over if you don't accept the argument works the exact same way from "the other" side is merely a question of how high that balance is, which causes are allowed to spend that balance, and for what reason. The pro-gun side's argument is that "complete disarmament would, counterintuitively, lead to more murder"; the pro-abortion side's argument is similarly utilitarian, so is the pro-trans one.

"The optimal number of in society is not 0" is about tradeoffs; it's not supposed to indicate you make no attempt to reduce X even when there's no cost to doing so.

The "all of them" response is not saying there's a tradeoff, it's not saying the optimal number of dead kids is non-zero; it's rejecting the tradeoff entirely, saying that no number of dead children is worth any gun control. Or would, if you took it literally. What it's actually saying is more like "we reject your framing, and fuck you". Which is much the same as what Fuentes is saying, except that women as a class are more sympathetic than gun grabbers.

Bodily autonomy is a fake argument because in practice nothing else follows from it aside from abortion.

And sex work, and medical transition for minors.

Bodily autonomy is a fake argument because in practice nothing else follows from it aside from abortion.

Hey, there are some of us who are actually consistent on this - pro-abortion, pro drug decriminalization, and anti-vaccination. You just won't find us in the Democratic party.

A right-wing female friend sent me a screenshot of this yesterday and said she was embarrassed to be associated with the idiots who wrote it. For my part, I think it's counterproductive memetics. While I've personally chuckled at some similar memes - e.g., "They're milking AOC on the White House lawn and you're laughing?" for its sheer absurdity - I reckon this kind of extreme edgelord humour is alienating and mysterious for the vast majority of women.

Male friends can absolutely drag the shit out of each other and it's still pretty good-natured, or even an active form of bonding, but nothing as overt happens in female circles. Similarly, young men on voicechat on videogames have been talking about fucking each others' moms in various depraved ways for decades, while lots of women experience this as traumatising aggression. It's clearly a gendered phenomenon, potentially even a biological one - it wouldn't surprise me if we found that isolated tribes in Papua New Guinea where men bond with "your momma" jokes. But I think it codes as grossly and pointlessly inoffensive to most women and genuinely scary to some. While I think that's large because they just "don't get it", that doesn't change the fact that it's probably bad politics.

Similarly, young men on voicechat on videogames have been talking about fucking each others' moms in various depraved ways for decades, while lots of women experience this as traumatising aggression.

This is such a weirdly off-base comparison, though. The proper analog would be men joking about raping each other "in various depraved ways," not each other's moms (as the saying goes, tragedy is me getting a paper cut, comedy is anyone else besides me getting raped). Do locker-room lads generally respond with twinkling eyes and good-humored grins when their bros graphically describe how they will bend them over, force them to the ground and ravage their assholes as they scream, because their bodies are somebody else's choice? Maybe so, I don't hang out in men's locker rooms. Sounds fun!

A sincere question: if sexual-assault jokes are an essential and universal part of male bonding, do gay dudes joke about raping each other's dads?

The topic of sexual assault is certainly nothing sacred in these interactions in the same way it is in mixed settings, but there’s typically the gay taboo in all of this, so you’re not going to joke about raping another man unless you’re willing to roll with that. That said, as the homophonic taboos weaken, I expect we’ll see more inter-male banter like this.

But for the original claim to be true, that rape jokes are just fun male bonding and guys don't take it too seriously, then there should be no gay taboo at all, correct? Because the idea of being physically forced to be penetrated in ways you don't want, by a stronger person whom you don't desire, is not threatening or traumatizing to men, so why would it be less funny for a straight guy than for a gay guy?

It's telling that your bottom link is not actually a friendly moment of male banter, but a dominance chest-thump from a Gen X right-leaning guy toward his Gen-Z leftist outgroup, and even so he attempts only an extremely gentle and euphemistic joke about male-male quasi-seduction ("you'd be my concubines") happening in an explicitly counterfactual world. Is the expectation that the Gen Z boys will respond "LOL good one you magnificent bastard," because boy talk is just like that? Would O'Neill respond that way if somebody joked about his entering concubinage in turn?

What about if they did so in more explicitly rapey language like "your body is my choice," or by describing the "depraved" things they would do to him, and how much he'd like it once they got started?

What about if they did so while also casually showing that they were armed, so that while they're joking about raping him right now, it could definitely real-life happen at any future point if they encounter him? What if it were not an ex-Navy SEAL joking about doing this to high-school kids, but an established MMA champion joking about doing "depraved" things to one of the programmers on TheMotte? Would any given male Mottizen still reliably find this hilarious?

But for the original claim to be true, that rape jokes are just fun male bonding and guys don't take it too seriously, then there should be no gay taboo at all, correct?

The gay taboo is specifically about gay desire. That's why "I'm going to bend you over and fuck you in the ass" is not a viable taunt for straight men to make with each other - because it would easily be answered with "sounds pretty homo dude".

Conversely, inter-male jokes about being the victim of male-on-male sexual violence are pretty common. For example, in my all-male D&D campaign, the party encountered a lascivious older male NPC wizard who was clearly had a crush on the party's young attractive male bard, played by a dude we'll call Adam. Cue endless jokes among the players directed at Adam talking about how he'd better sleep on his back tonight, how his ringpiece felt the next morning, was his anal virginity still intact, etc.. And I should add that this is a pretty progressive group - I'm the closest thing to a right-winger! Needless to say, if this had been a female player - or even a man playing a female character - the players wouldn't have made those same jokes.

Some of that is because they're nice liberal guys who (unlike Nick Fuentes) have internalised the idea that this isn't something decent men joke about, but also because male-on-female rape largely just isn't funny for men in the same way as male-on-male rape or female-on-male rape. To give another case, a male friend of mine was actually in a pretty exploitative gay male relationship at his British boarding school - he (age 14) was the eromenos to an older (17 year old) erastes. And although he's now completely straight-identified, when he's with his old friends from school they make jokes at his expense about it, and he takes them in good humour, even though it was clearly pretty exploitative and illegal.

I appreciate you engaging with this sincerely, but for what it's worth, I think it sort of makes my point that most people who aren't straight males are deeply unaware of the way straight men standardly talk to each other or the underlying intentions behind it. One of my old undergrad students came out in his second year as a trans man, and as an avid soccer player, he switched from the women's to the men's team (I should add, this was a casual college team, not elite sports). But he told me he was absolutely shocked and appalled to hear how the men's team spoke to each other in the (literal!) locker rooms and at the pub afterwards - casual racism, homophobia, misogyny, etc. was rampant. I tried to gently suggest to him that this was very much how men interact in all-male settings, and it wasn't probably wasn't the product of malice or genuine animus, instead reflecting transgressive humour, and he should take it as a compliment that he was being fully accepted as "one of the guys." But it was a real culture shock for him, and something he wasn't remotely prepared for when he transitioned.

This is partly because the norms of mixed company are now, and long have been, far more influenced by all-female conversational and social norms than all-male ones. Sure, people were a bit scandalised when Sex and the City came out and showed how women "really talk to each other", but in general, my sense is that there's less of an obvious frame-shift between all-female and mixed company than all-male and mixed company. This is especially true given the major transition in many white-collar professional contexts over the last thirty years from male conversational norms (Pirelli calendar, lots of banter, explicitly cut-throat dynamics) to female ones (superficial positivity, politeness, less overt aggression).

I'd flag that in giving the above spiel, I'm not defending male conversational norms as inherently superior or suggesting that there's nothing wrong with making rape jokes on twitter. A lot of men feel that the "locker room talk" is puerile or gross or dumb, and deliberately avoid it; for my part, at high school I always enjoyed the comparatively polite mixed-company norms of Drama Club more than those of the all-male sports teams (although it was partly because I was a horny straight male teenager and had crushes on various theatre girls). On top of that, men since time immemorial have known that certain kinds of banter or humour were not suitable for mixed company, and people who make rape jokes in front of women are violating male as much as group social norms ("don't scare the hoes" may be a modern coinage but the sentiment is an old one). Of course, social media makes these things complicated insofar as it collapses traditional distinctions of space and group, but I think Fuentes knew exactly what he was doing.

So yeah, as I said, bad memetics for the right, and I'm not surprised it got the reaction it did. The only hill I'm dying on here is that I think that the actual communicative intention behind this kind of humour is typically misconstrued by women as more sincere or literal or psychopathic than it is, whereas men can more readily see that it's taking a kind of entirely performative humour/banter/mock aggression that's common in all-male contexts and employing it outside of them.

The only hill I'm dying on here is that I think that the actual communicative intention behind this kind of humour is typically misconstrued by women as more sincere or literal or psychopathic than it is, whereas men can more readily see that it's taking a kind of entirely performative humour/banter/mock aggression that's common in all-male contexts and employing it outside of them

Thanks for your candor and critical thinking about this! I think the only hill I'd die on is that female proscription of rape humor is similarly rational and grounded in practical safety considerations for female-bodied people in a sexually dimorphic species, not just some outpouring of blue-haired librarian priggishness as various bros would have it elsewhere on this site.

But I'm also a bit skeptical of attempts to place male aggressive humor beyond political analysis because it's supposedly so impartially transgressive and also 100% facetious and harmless. Sure, there are plenty of nuts overreacting to mildly edgy jokes these days, but it also doesn't match my experience to say that men's humor suggests nothing about their underlying views and values because they apply that humor equally to every possible target. I think there are types of harm and violence that men don't joke about, either because it would provoke a threatening response or because they just don't find it funny, and I suspect those gaps probably signal underlying vulnerabilities and anxieties the same way that jokes about raping aged moms aren't as funny to people in the process of becoming weak old ladies (and conversely, a surprising number of Twitter feminists turned out to enjoy jokes about assaulting Republican women and TERFS over the past few years). So it does seem worth exploring the contours a little. I also think that transgressiveness and dominance/aggression are two separate things - I know humorists who are wildly transgressive but still don't make any jokes of the dick-swinging, put-down sort - so just pointing out that men love breaking rules doesn't fully account for what makes women uneasy about YOUR BODY MY CHOICE.

Two follow-up questions: do men think it's funny to joke about raping each other's daughters, the way it's funny to joke about raping moms? I feel like the former isn't as common. Why? How about each other's sons?

Second, there are plenty of humorless men out there (I've met some of them!). When a guy has no sense of humor, how does his participation in locker-room banter usually fall flat? Does he go too far? Not far enough? Not in the right direction?

I think @Amadan has answered some of this, and I agree with everything he says, but just to add a couple of follow-ups...

do men think it's funny to joke about raping each other's daughters, the way it's funny to joke about raping moms?

Absolutely not, and interestingly in every 'locker room' context I've been in, joking about someone's kids in any negative way (not even just sexual) would code as deeply taboo. Here's a funny scene touching on that idea from In Bruges. I'm not exactly sure why it's taboo, when mothers are fair game, but jokes about someone's kids are ugly or dumb or gay would come across very poorly.

When a guy has no sense of humor, how does his participation in locker-room banter usually fall flat? Does he go too far? Not far enough?

I think it's fair to read a lot of this form of male-bonding as a kind of test or trial for male-coded social skills - being able to come up with a good clapback, knowing what's going too far, knowing how to insult someone in a way that they will correctly interpret as affectionate.* I think men who struggle with locker-room talk fall into two main camps. The first are those who can handle the social dynamics but don't like the mock aggression, and to oversimplify, they become theatre/art/literature club kids. The second are those who ASD kids who don't get the complex social dynamics. They'll tend to filter out into the predictable science, math, and engineering clubs.

I've framed it in terms of high school, but I really think this kind of male behaviour really gets going around puberty in high-testosterone environments, specifically sports teams, and it filters out some people from male sports in general (not coincidentally, the boys on top of the sports hierarchy tend to be on top of the male high school hierarchy in general). Nonetheless, it persists into adulthood in similarly all-male and high testosterone contexts, and whenever you get a group of men of any age together with alcohol and an absence of women, it will tend to manifest. Again, there will be some guys for whom this is more natural, and others who find it uncomfortable, so they'll tend to just change the subject or shift the vibe.

And also to clarify re this:

I'm also a bit skeptical of attempts to place male aggressive humor beyond political analysis because it's supposedly so impartially transgressive and also 100% facetious and harmless.

@Amadan completely nailed my position. I'm not saying it's beyond political analysis - that's what I'm trying to do, through giving it a genealogy. I also think Fuentes is knowingly violating the norms here to get a reaction. But I also think a lot of the commentary I've seen from women involves a straightforward epistemic mistake in interpreting his intention and failing to contextualise it in the background of male-coded banter. As you note, there are practical reasons why women have a hair-trigger sensitivity to any kind of rape humour, but that's also what Fuentes is relying on.

I'm not exactly sure why it's taboo, when mothers are fair game, but jokes about someone's kids are ugly or dumb or gay would come across very poorly.

Yeah, I think this is what I meant by making humor subject to "political analysis": not hand-wringing that rape jokes mean you're a rapist, but acknowledging that a group's perception of what's funny vs. unfunny could indicate something important about their underlying sentiments and desires, and that it's fair to investigate those sentiments by close-reading the jokes. Ironically, the threat of over-reading is probably what provokes some of the compensatory under-reading here, but there must be some level of valid interpretation between "jokes are a straightforward statement of intention" and "jokes mean literally nothing about anything."

(For instance, on why mama jokes are funny but daughter jokes aren't-- is it possible that most men have a little bit of underlying resentment/ contempt for older women, including their moms, that makes it a teeeeny bit viscerally enjoyable to imagine them being put in their place or subjected to male dominance, whereas having a beloved daughter demeaned is just straightforwardly painful?)

I think men who struggle with locker-room talk fall into two main camps. The first are those who can handle the social dynamics but don't like the mock aggression, and to oversimplify, they become theatre/art/literature club kids. The second are those who ASD kids who don't get the complex social dynamics.

That's really interesting: when I asked the question I was thinking about a certain type of dumb and self-serious but also very athletic "jughead"-style guy that seems both common in sporty contexts and reasonably socially successful. Having known those folks in their administrative and bureaucratic afterlives, they seem too rigid, touchy and literal-minded to ever have been great at verbal sparring, but that's just from mixed-company observations. Are successful jocks really witty and transgressive with other men? I'm trying to imagine what that would even sound like.

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But I'm also a bit skeptical of attempts to place male aggressive humor beyond political analysis because it's supposedly so impartially transgressive and also 100% facetious and harmless.

Isn't political analysis exactly what @doglatine was doing? I didn't read him as saying male aggressive humor is 100% facetious and harmless; it's that the seriousness and harmfulness is very context-sensitive. Nick Fuentes's "joke" was intentionally meant to freak out liberal women who right now are already freaking out over Trump's election, and to the degree it's not serious, he's capitalizing on the fact that so many women will take it seriously. Nick Fuentes is an asshole (because people who go out of their way to poke people in the eye are always assholes) for verbalizing something that would be a joke between men in private but will be read as a threat if voiced in public. Locker room jokes about banging your mom are funny (for a certain kind of man) in the locker room; made on Twitter, you'll get people reading you as sincerely threatening to rape someone's mom, and while a certain kind of man will find that funny too, it's not at all the same kind of humor.

I know humorists who are wildly transgressive but still don't make any jokes of the dick-swinging, put-down sort - so just pointing out that men love breaking rules doesn't fully account for what makes women uneasy about YOUR BODY MY CHOICE.

This is true, and there are a lot of men who don't like put-down banter, would not find "your body, my choice" amusing, and most roll their eyes at such jokes. But the difference here is that a man will still understand that it's "boys being boys" and just roll his eyes, whereas to a woman, the very idea of "boys being boys" seems to excuse and justify such humor, which they find morally reprehensible and threatening. A lot us (speaking as the sort of man who doesn't particularly like the locker room stuff) sense that women, if they had the power to do so, would love to enter the locker room and tell us "You can't do that." How often have I read an overwrought think-piece by a liberal (often single) mother about her teenage sons, whom she loves dearly but she's absolutely terrified that they will become those sorts of boys - the sort of boys who tell locker-room jokes, the sorts of boys who roll their eyes when she's haranguing them about the Patriarchy, the sorts of boys who will become rapists!!!

Two follow-up questions: do men think it's funny to joke about raping each other's daughters, the way it's funny to joke about raping moms? I feel like the former isn't as common. Why? How about each other's sons?

I first want to say, as one of those men @doglatine mentions who thinks locker room humor is puerile, that you may be overestimating just how common and blatant such jokes are. Having been in plenty of male environments, yes, I've heard lots of crude humor and innuendos that wouldn't be voiced around women, but "I'm gonna fuck your mom" isn't really something I hear a lot. I'd guess it's more of an online gamer thing (the same sort of crowd that likes dropping n-bombs and "faggot" just to try to distress their opponents). But yeah, to the degree that someone might joke about banging someone else's mom, "mom jokes" are an ancient and well-understood form of low humor that no one really takes seriously. Jokes about banging your daughter are a lot more aggressive and threatening - not threatening in the sense that you'd likely believe they really intended to rape your daughter, but threatening in the sense that the message is not funny. The message is "You're such a pussy I could rape your daughter and you wouldn't be able to stop me." So no, a man wouldn't find that funny.

Threatening to rape your son would be the same, with the added implication that your son is gay (or will be a "bottom" for a dominant man), so you'd be explicitly insulting both the father's manhood and his son's.

Indeed, when in mixed company, men tend to refrain from raunchy or edgy jokes, risqué locker room-adjacent topics, or offering a glimpse of their actual opinion on a potentially controversial issue, just as one might around children or the Thought Police.

In addition, on a more subtle basis, men tend to code-switch from male-only company to when one or more woman is present, catering to women’s sensibilities. A lot of times this is subconscious; men might not even realize they’re doing it.

Around women, the average man deploys softer, more euphemistic language than he would use when in the company of just other men, lest he commit the mortal sin of offending a woman or hurting her feelings. For example, “fucking” or “banging” often becomes “hooking up with” or “sleeping with.” If in just the company of other men, one of my male friends unironically used the phrase “sleeping with” as an euphemism for sex, I’d be concerned that he recently suffered a concussion, is growing a brain tumor, is developing ultra-early dementia, or got body-snatched by an alien.

The topic of sexual assault is certainly nothing sacred in these interactions in the same way it is in mixed settings,

I disagree. I've heard a lot of "I'm gonna fuck your mom" discourse in my time, but the implication is usually that she's been seduced. Suggesting that you were would rape someone's mother would go beyond the bounds of banter and would be seen as pretty hostile (or quite weird at best)

Yeah, the point with the rape comments on video games is that it’s considered low-status and inappropriate even by the low standards of teenage boys. Those kids were always considered to have anger issues, no one actually defended them. It’s the softer and more playful ribbing that’s normal for well-adjusted men.

I also think it comes with a side of “I’ve cucked your dad.” And the point of the cuckold meme isn’t that someone raped your wife, it’s that someone was so charming and superior to you that she couldn’t resist your charm.

[cw: all links involve pretty crude jokes with audio]

Do locker-room lads generally respond with twinkling eyes...

I don't think it's universal, but there's absolutely some spaces where variants of gay chicken that get that direction. It's... actually kinda awkward in mixed-orientation environments, especially where not everyone knows each other's orientation is common knowledge (conversation starts at 20:00, relevant bit continuing to 21:30).

Just in the last two weeks, I've had a male co-volunteer at an IRL project I've helped with set up,and continue a joke where the punchline involved him asking me to punch his v-card, and me responding 'I'd have to buy you dinner after', and him laughing at it. I'm pretty sure he's straight? But it's an education-focused IRL project, so it's not like I'm out, there, anyway.

((That said, even those spaces require pretty specific levels of familiarity and have other specific taboos; Fuentes, here, is just being an ass.))

A sincere question: if sexual-assault jokes are an essential and universal part of male bonding, do gay dudes joke about raping each other's dads?

Uh... at least for 'fucked your mom' level jokes, absolutely positively yes.

Uh... at least for 'fucked your mom' level jokes, absolutely positively yes.

Those are pretty funny, and also it's interesting that they are so very, very delicate about it: the language is "I want to flirt with your dad" and "I did your dad," both of which are like 5th-grade starter-pack level in the scale of "fucked your mom" jokes. So maybe it will evolve all the way to where a dude can joke about how another guy's dad moaned as he double-fisted him last night, who knows?

While we're in this media sphere, another thing I've been genuinely curious about: what's the standard level of sexual violence theming in gay porn (of the sort actually made for gay men)? Like, does popular gay porn do "dumb twink rammed until he CAN'T WALK STRAIGHT" or "Ten portly bears PUNISH this bratty man's BLEEDING ASSHOLE while he begs" style videos at the same rate as straight porn, and are there similar levels of theming about men getting choked and hit, getting stuck in tight places and begging for help, having guys cum on their face and chest, etc., as you see in videos about male sex with women?

... the language is "I want to flirt with your dad" and "I did your dad," both of which are like 5th-grade starter-pack level in the scale of "fucked your mom" jokes.

That, uh, says as much about what I'm willing to link (and what can be posted on youtube/twitch/yada) as much as it does about behaviors in certain social circles. I'll admit I haven't seen double-fisting specifically brought to offer, but neither does it stop at teabagging jokes.

While we're in this media sphere, another thing I've been genuinely curious about: what's the standard level of sexual violence theming in gay porn (of the sort actually made for gay men)?

I think aoiislove overstates the extent it shows up in all gay male sexuality, but it's definitely present, and pretty common. It's a little hard to calculate exactly, because there's a lot of stuff that's sexual violence to women and also has gay men lining up (sometimes literally) to receive. (and conversely, a few things that are more appalling to gay guys.)

Like, does popular gay porn do "dumb twink rammed until he CAN'T WALK STRAIGHT" or "Ten portly bears PUNISH this bratty man's BLEEDING ASSHOLE while he begs" style videos at the same rate as straight porn

Can't walk straight, definitely, along with a lot of similar stuff ('guts rearranged' is popular right now, 'wrecks hole' been along since before I knew I was bi, sometimes just 'dominates' or even just outright 'bullies'). Ten portly bears definitely, and while it's a little hard as a direct comparison because there's a lot of gay guys for whom that sounds like a great start to a Friday night, there's enough where it's not supposed to be attractive or appealing directly that is pretty comparable. Bleeding is a bit unusual: there's commercial restrictions for mainstream credit card sites that are more intended for actual knives-and-beatings BDSM edgeplay, but mainstream merchants still avoid it. The closest common gay male porn term would probably be some variant of 'gape'.

and are there similar levels of theming about men getting choked and hit,

Yeah. Not my thing, but slapping, choking (with hands or dick), hitting, spitting, markings, comically oversized sex toys, (usually fake) 'insufficient lube', that sort of rough sex has enough of a following you have to put some effort on mainstream sites to avoid it.

... getting stuck in tight places and begging for help, having guys cum on their face and chest...

These ones are hard to compare directly. The latter in particular is extremely common ('painting', straight-up bukkake), but it's... probably not something most people think about as sexual violence?

I'll point to Braeburned's Room 609 (llama guy puts himself in a hole in a door, gets eiffel tower'd by his roommate and whoever his roommate taps on an app to take the other side) comic as an example of the problem: it's easy to frame what's effectively a gay-male-variant of the 'free use' fantasy that in its het form is very much built around ignoring women's consent and physical integrity... but Braeburned and quite a large portion of the fans of the series are preferentially bottoms, and even in his other comics that have a guy getting a surprise train run on them (eg Gay For Play, where the main character gets roped into a football team prank that ends up... where you'd expect) can credibly make it seem consenting because it's pretty clear the author would love it. That's a furry example, but there are non-furry and conventional-porn ones, just harder to track down names and personalities involved.

That's not to say clearly eroticized sexual violence using these themes is unusual -- I'll point to NakedSav's "Marked Prey" as one that's very much presented from an mdom rather than msub perspective, and the msub side is about as degrading as the author's willing to go. It definitely shows up as a thing in certain types of gay-for-pay or masc4masc genre 'normal' porn. But it may not be useful as a metric, compared to other traits in the work.

Stuck in tight places is kinda a goofy 'plot', even by porn plot standards, and thus pretty rare, but it definitely shows up, including the begging (or at least pretense of it for a couple seconds). There's a mostly-gay-specific thing about (ruiadri just posted a great one today!) about making a sub paint themselves, but I dunno what the comparable het thing would be outside of pegging/pretty heavy femdom.

I'm late responding, but just wanted to say that it's been a while since I read anything so solidly info-dense and enlightening. Wish I could find more deep dives into the entirely foreign and fascinating culture of gay porn. Thank you for this!

A sincere question: if sexual-assault jokes are an essential and universal part of male bonding, do gay dudes joke about raping each other's dads?

Yeah, making another guy's dad your bottom is a common joke.

The thought that, in ${CurrentYear}, there is likely a non-zero number of grade school kids who taunt each other not by saying “my dad would beat up your dad,” but rather “my dad would TOP your dad,” warms my icy heart.

Talking about fucking someone’s mom isn’t rape. It is about seducing.

Both of those types exist (with "seducing" implying the mom's a slut), and the ones implying she's a literal whore are pretty common too.

It can be a form of bonding, but it's also something a lot of men just tolerate because that's just how the spaces are and you have to tolerate it if you want to play certain games. Im not sure what the ratio would be (curious now that I've thought up the hypothetical) but if male gamers were given a choice to move over to identical platforms minus 'i had sex with your mom' edgelords, I think the Exodus would be pretty sizable.

All that to say I agree it is more of a male phenomenon, but it does code as gross and offensive to even a lot of them who are found in those spaces

Like everything else unpleasant in society, this is downstream of modern gaming matchmaking.

When you're spending hours in a specific server going back and forth with someone, or playing with your own friends, the behavior isn't bad because you've built up a relationship. It's not a big deal to insult someone because somewhere in the next hour they'll land a good shot on you and can have any bad feeling erased with catharsis at your outraged stream of profanity. And both of you can be honest with your feelings rather than bottling them up.

When you're in a skill-based zero-player-choice matchmaking world where you interact with any given person for 20 minutes tops before they disappear into the endless sea of players, there's no time to develop that relationship and it's just a stream of unrelated people yelling awful things at you.

And both of you can be honest with your feelings rather than bottling them up.

Never believed this nugget of folk psychology. If emotions were truly something that are better dealt with outbursts of profanity rather than "bottled up", it would imply people most eager to use profanity and insults would be the most emotionally balanced. After all, if the folk theory is right, they should have nothing bottled up because they regularly let it all out? In my experience, it is rather the other way around. It is the constantly decently mannered, outwardly respectful people who are most likely to show good quality of character, are more likely to do genuinely nice things and avoid gossip, rude comments and dominance plays. More constant the decent behavior, more honest the character. More profanity-prone person, less likely you want to stay around them.

It is an observation that plays nicely with CBT that I've been exposed to: emotions are more like habits or a muscle than pressure cylinders you can't control: the purpose of the therapy is to build habit of not entering the destructive or unproductive mental states. Not far-fetched that embracing a behavior playfully makes it easier to habitually access associated mental space in other context.

If emotions were truly something that are better dealt with outbursts of profanity rather than "bottled up", it would imply people most eager to use profanity and insults would be the most emotionally balanced.

It wouldn't, because "not bottling up" doesn't mean you have to take the entire bottom of the bottle away.

I think Ctrl-Alt-Del spoke for a lot of gamers with its comic about how to deal with those sorts of irritating players.

I agree with this.

Even relatively feminine men will absolutely roast each other in male-only spaces. Playful teasing, joking boundary-pushing, and obviously your momma jokes are everywhere, when you get men together in a space that doesn't include women.

This is why Trump's "it was just locker room talk" defense for the pussy tape in 2016 seemed to work for him: that kind of horny bravado is just what men get up to with each other.

But when women come into the space, everything changes. Women very much seem to hate the idea that men alter their behavior when they come around. But they do. And the reason why men chill out when women come in isn't because they are ashamed of their behavior, or are trying to hide something. It's a mark of respect: they acknowledge that women aren't into it and find it discomfiting, and respect this preference by choosing not to engage in it around them. It's sort of like how I might use profanity while talking to my friends, but would never do so when visiting my mom.

I'm a big defender of male-only spaces and organizations, because we very much need for men to have an outlet to bond over this stuff. Bottling it up or refusing to give men the ability to bond with other men doesn't help -- in fact, it makes it more likely that guys will try to use it to bond with women.

And bonding with women over this stuff sometimes works! 'Negging', as a complaint, gets a lot of airtime. But there's a great deal of the phenomenon that's simply a part of how people flirt. Contrary to the popular interpretation, playful negging isn't about trying to genuinely hurt someone's self-esteem. What it does is create a sense of intimacy, by making statements that would be totally uncalled-for if made by a total stranger, and playfully dancing around the contradiction that the people are strangers. And it in fact presents a theoretical possibility of threat! But the point that's being made is that the man is so unwilling to pose a threat to the woman that the idea of him posing a threat to her is a big joke. He playfully insults because he's profoundly not interested in really insulting or threatening, and if it really is playful and there's chemistry, healthy, well-adjusted women enjoy the game. I have flirting level -100, so I'll refrain from giving an example.

This is fundamentally what men are doing with each other when they bond like this: they're accentuating the intimacy they feel for each other by demonstrating that they're so close and their bond is so tight, they can insult each other and engage in dominance behavior without any real threat. It's an indication that these men are so utterly far from threatening each other that even the concept of threatening each other is a massive joke that people find hilarious because of its implausibility. (This is the same reason why straight men engage in boundary-pushing claims of homosexuality -- they're so straight that even the concept of having sex with each other is an implausible joke. I presume this is one of those things that would really annoy a gay man if he happened to be present.)

The phrase I've seen to describe the differences between male and female bonding is that "men will insult your mother and have your back, women will tell you that you're beautiful and stab you in it." 'Toxic positivity', insofar as it exists, is mostly a phenomenon of female bonding styles being applied to broader social environments. 'Toxic masculinity', particularly the old complaints about angry gamer boys making puerile jokes, comes from these forms of male bonding being taken too far, and applied by skill-less idiots to environments of actual competition, or brought out in mixed company.

That's not to say that men can't engage in very positive, productive conversations with a lot of affection -- or that women can't be openly insulting. But there are differences in communication styles that reflect how men are theoretically threats to each other and to women for social power or attention, and this conceptual threat must be managed and minimized by close friends to the point of humor. The big problem is when this humor escapes the male-only and flirting contexts where it's effective, or is received poorly by people who don't want it or find it alienating.

If you think I lack for evidence for this just-so story, go look at the youtube comments for a male-oriented video and witness the "bro really took this too far," "least addicted gamer," "it's not that deep" comments, and then go look at a female-oriented video and witness the "OH MY GOD YOU ARE SO BEAUTIFUL," "Dr. So-and-so is so warm and helpful with such a great bedside manner ," "awwwwwww Butter the cat is such a cutie" comments.

I agree with most of this, but I feel like some male shit-talking and joking, at least in a group setting, also has an element of faux-combat. Constantly challenging each other is a form of play-fighting, but it's also a test - someone who regularly can't come up with a comeback or simply shuts down will eventually lose status and become more likely to be simply dominated by the others.

Yeah, sometimes that is the case, depending on the structure and personalities of the friend group. What I've outlined is how it tends to be in my own friend groups, which have been very nerdy, and tended towards playfulness and silliness rather than combativeness and dominance-testing.

This is fundamentally what men are doing with each other when they bond like this: they're accentuating the intimacy they feel for each other by demonstrating that they're so close and their bond is so tight, they can insult each other and engage in dominance behavior without any real threat.

Late to the party, but Scott refers to the phenomenon you're describing as "countersignalling". Essentially, "I trust you enough that I can insult you, knowing that you'll understand no real malice is intended and you'll take it in good humour". Zizek argues that ribald jokes of this kind are vital for defusing tensions between members of warring ethnic groups.

I'm not convinced that there is anything "to get" in this case. Its a simple expression of "boo outgroup" where Fuentes' "outgroup" is women in general and liberal women in particular. Make of that what you will.

Contrast this with the classical form of the Your Momma or Dead Baby joke where the target of the joke is invited to respond and then recieves a subversive rejoinder in the form of the punchline.

Similarly, young men on voicechat on videogames have been talking about fucking each others' moms in various depraved ways for decades, while lots of women experience this as traumatising aggression. It's clearly a gendered phenomenon, potentially even a biological one - it wouldn't surprise me if we found that isolated tribes in Papua New Guinea where men bond with "your momma" jokes.

There's an (unfortunately incomplete) cuneiform tablet dating back to 1500 B.C. that includes, among other jokes, "[...] of your mother is by the one who has intercourse with her. Who is it?"

Sadly, the fragmented tablet does not include the punchline, although given the other jokes/riddles, it presumably would have lost something in the translation.

The incoming administration has promised to punt the issue of abortion to the States and I hope they go one step further and enshrine this punt with a Constitutional amendment that would keep the federal government out of the business altogether, including encouraging or discouraging States or individuals via funding, services, etc. And probably also prohibiting States from punishing abortion tourists in any way.

There are so many important issues of geopolitics and energy and trade and I'm so fucking tired of this issue being at the top of mind every single national election (for literally my entire life and I'm over 40!!!), and half the electorate being one-issue voters about it so you can't even have a real conversation with them about anything else.

It might also help heal relations between the sexes but I won't bet on that, let's not get too greedy now.

Such an amendment would discredit the government for obvious reasons. The abortion issue is a reductio ad absurdum of democracy. Apparently the electorate cannot even agree to prohibit the industrialized slaughter of infants.

Such an amendment would discredit the government for obvious reasons.

Not obvious to me, can you elaborate? I personally think that there doesn't need to be an amendment because the federal government doesn't have authority to restrict abortion anyways, but I don't see how it would be bad to include an amendment to explicitly prohibit it.

It is obviously the duty of the government to prevent its own people, and particularly children, from being murdered.

Murder is not a federal crime (with some special-case exceptions)

But it's not obvious that a fetus a couple of weeks old is a child.

The political environment isn’t at all conducive to it, but even under a narrow reading of federal powers the feds could prohibit interstate traffic in abortifacients or crossing state lines to obtain an abortion.

Interstate traffic in abortifacients yes, prohibiting "crossing state lines to obtain an abortion" is already a stretch, though nothing like the utter goatse of Wickard v. Fillburn.

Inasmuch as there's a breakdown in relations between sexes, I don't think you repair that without making abortion (at least during the first trimester) widely available.

I think the next 20 years is going to give us hard evidence on:

  1. Is civil marriage necessary for society to function / is long term civil marriage actually a huge benefit to spouses and children?
  2. Is sexual discipline far more valuable (maybe even necessary) than the whole of society has assumed since the late 1960s.

My prediction (which is heavily biased due to my value system): Couples that get married and stay married will become something like a new aristocracy. Generational wealth will literally be as easy as not cheating on your wife. Children with stable two parent households will not only outcompete their peers, but will have a compounding advantage by their age of majority.

Unwed single mothers, especially those who give birth before about 25, will become wards of the state to an even more extreme degree. Sadly, I think that state provided support will become so egregious that a single mother looking to get married would be committing economic suicide outside of finding a literal prince charming who already has the financial resources to subsume paying for everything.

Another way of summing this up; Some part of society will self-select to sexual and mating habits that look like the 1950s, while another, probably larger part will accelerate to poly-orgy levels of libertinism. My assumption is that the former will control an incredibly disproportionate level of wealth and political control. This is all very Matrix-y; The lowerclass in 2045 in America will be face tattooed Zi/Zirs wired into machines 24/7 with a host of pharmacological cocktails coursing through their veins. Sexual gratification options will be nonstop both in advertisement and usage. The upperclass will simply be everyone who can say "No" for a while and unplug.

Generational wealth will literally be as easy as not cheating on your wife.

I think they call this "a financial path to home ownership" these days.

the next 20 years is going to give us hard evidence

Hard evidence has already been provided.

For 1, we already know that being in a single-parent household is detrimental to average outcomes. Now, to what degree this is because the children are obviously going to possess the genes of someone who becomes a single mother (or single father) is another story- apples don't necessarily fall far from trees, and not being able to stick with a marriage is an indictment either of one's time preference or one's general ability to select a partner long-term over short-term concerns. Relative lack of resources for childhood development is another thing that can cause this, since single-family homes are required for self-development not limited to what doesn't make a lot of noise or take up that much space to practice (you aren't maintaining a vehicle, practicing an instrument, etc. in a two-bedroom apartment, so what you can get up to -> the ways these types of children develop their minds are more limited) and it's not 1980 where you could afford one of those on a single income.

For 2... well, there's a massive two-movies-one-screen effect that's been going on for the last 60 years about sexual ethics. The short version is that the people who don't need sexual ethics for the sake of sexual ethics (and their "sexual ethics" comes more from practical constraints than anything handed down from on high) came to power and re-made marriage laws in their own image. These are people who choose a life partner based on an utterly childish conception of love an intent and ability to align their wills to each other rather than just because he's rich/she's hot. And it's very difficult to determine who's saying what, and who's pushing which politics, and why- I don't think there's been a concerted effort to obfuscate this information (though certain traditionalist and progressive types try their best, especially if there's a religion/woke involved), but the results aren't meaningfully distinct from that.

Problem is, they shouldn't ever have insisted on that being marriage (even though the room temperature of the '60s and '70s made that kind of unavoidable), and considered that (before deciding to explode everything) this a-sexual mode of love might be technically ideal but is not, in fact, normal. And they decided to ban certain kinds of behaviors based on the fact that men and women operating in this mode are equal- so obviously, she should get half of the assets in the no-fault divorce, because people who don't/can't get along outside of their normal gender roles don't get married. Obviously. [Just ignore that 50% total divorce rate; it's not like that combined with the sex the resources/custody in the divorce tend to more often be awarded to trivially repudiate that thesis.]

Therefore, men and women who don't actually like each other but want to get married for other reasons probably need to be staring down the barrel of society's shotgun a little more than they already do for better societal outcomes (though at the same time, be provided carrots- men and women need to be marrying much earlier than they already do for family formation reasons and fixing that is both inextricably linked to this problem and is the harder of the two). Men and women who don't need marriage, by contrast, shouldn't get married, nor should the State treat them as if they were (as they do in some countries).

Men and women aren't equal except for the ones that are. A default plus an opt out for the people sufficiently informed/capable is what can work- but that requires a populace disciplined enough (or distracted enough) to keep that balance.

I think I agree with you? I find your prose to be a little serpentine and hard to follow at times.

The short version is that the people who don't need sexual ethics for the sake of sexual ethics (and their "sexual ethics" comes more from practical constraints than anything handed down from on high) came to power and re-made marriage laws in their own image.

Could I request you try rephrasing this so that I can better understand. Again, I'm pretty sure we're on the same page.

Sure.

I think the "new" post-Sexual Revolution sexual ethics were made by people who didn't, or couldn't, recognize that most relationships are at least a little dysfunctional (we were very rich at the time, which can cover up a great deal of bad in a relationship- no fights about cooking if you can just afford takeout, after all- and sex was the least risky it's ever been in history due to reliable hormonal birth control and no incurable STD of consequence). When the pro-SR people are talking about "liberation" [but only pre-1980; post-1980 the actors change as the below takes effect], this is what they're talking about.

But if you give that group power, they enshrine their autistic/childish/unrealistic views of how sex and relationships (and by extension, men and women) operate into law. And the problem with that is the same one as it was with legal equality- it just tilts the playing field in favor of the sex whose advantages were most illegible to the system (and so abuse of those advantages stopped being controllable, creating the problems we have now).

The trick, then, is in implementing that inequality/equity- making sure the people who do need those rules obey them (and are protected by them in return), and making sure the people who don't need those rules do not have to (but are not).

Thank you!

I think this change would make its availability feel less precarious than it does now.

I think Trump already started shanking the pro-life right with his comment about how great IVF is. That was a preemptive move.

It remains to be seen how his administration handles the inevitable push for a federal abortion ban.

Looking at the abortion ballot results at a state level, proposing abortion legislation at the federal level seems like obvious suicide for the Republican party.

And yet there is a large part of the base that has been reliably turning out and will feel jilted if the GOP abandons them.

The pro-life right is also split on the question of a federal ban. Some want to push for one, some would push for one if they thought it were politically feasible (but they recognize it’s not), and some think the issue should belong to the states, period. When even the pro-lifers are split like this, the odds that a federal ban even makes it through one house of Congress is basically nil.

Agreed, and in the mean time there are a lot of pro lifers, including myself, who (as @Bleep points out) dont feel "jilted" as much as they are happy to take the overturning of Roe v Wade as a win

No they won't. There is a sizeable grifting industry which are jilted because Trump shut off a big spigot which they had been worthlessly living off of for decades. They have been attempting to mobilize others to also feel like they were "jilted" by Trump giving them their biggest win ever, but it has so far failed spectacularly.

This "large part" of the base can't stop modest abortion protections from being added to state constitutions in deep red states, so claiming after they were handed the biggest win they've ever had they're suddenly owed something like a nationwide abortion ban even if it cost Trump his entire mandate is pretty incredible to be honest.

The pro-lifers should be upset they got nothing after giving hundreds of millions to the useless GOP and a pro-life grifter class for decades. Focusing their ire on Trump after he got Roe v. Wade overturned is misplaced.

I think just as a matter of principle, we need to prevent commerce clause abuse and the abuse of federal funding which both end up being used as a back door way to force states to do whatever the federal government wants them to. As it stands the government can dictate through federal funding that roads be marked for bike lanes, that schools must teach LGBTQ narratives, that the state can regulate environmental protections on products that have never and will never leave their state of origin. It’s ridiculous.

As it stands the government can dictate through federal funding that roads be marked for bike lanes

What's the alternative here? That the federal government be banned from attaching any conditions to any funding given to states? How would that even work?

If you really want federalism, the federal government should be made to raise less taxes. Ideally the federal government shouldn't be able to tax citizens directly and should tax only the states. States would raise their own money to e.g. build roads.

Of course that's not really feasible either, not even if everybody really wanted it, because the federal government can print money or get loans from abroad, whereas the states cannot.

Here's how it would work

The above is a link to Saving Congress from Itself which is a wonderful book by William F. Buckely's brother. In many ways, he was far more accomplished than his more famous brother.

Anyway, the TLDR is that Congress has to start doing top level only block grants to the state. State's bundle together all of the federal funding requests they have and send it to Washington. Congress votes on a straight YES or NO to providing that funding. If they want to adjust the number, they only adjust the top line number (say from $10bn to $9.5 bn or what have you). There's no ability to say "This $5m slice has to go towards the LGBTQ bike lane in downtown San Antoino." Nope, it's just one, big number.

The result is that states get A LOT more leeway in what and how they spend their money. Also, there would be less bureaucracy as the endless "reports" on the use of funds would vanish. The result of this result is you'd start to see states that are fundamentally run better probably attract citizens from other states. The results of that result (result depth level: 3) is that we'd probably end up seeing even more stark disparities in outcomes. For instance, most of the states with the worst obesity, illiteracy, and high school graduation rates are in the Deep South or are those with sparse populations generally (WV and one of the Dakotas, IIRC). I'd expect this to continue and accelerate with a "Block Grants Only" approach.

But the result of that result (!), I think, would be that some states effectively become giant national parks with almost zero population. West Virginia, for instance, is now a net mortality state, meaning that more people die and leave the state than are born / move into it. Eastern West Virginia, south of the panhandle that includes Martinsburg and Charles Town, is one of the least densely populated places in the country - it's literally up there with Montana and Wyoming in the lower 48.

Would this be a good or bad thing? That's up to you to decide.

The alternative would be to not hold funds hostage. You want bike lanes, pass a law making bike lanes and fund them. As a completely separate thing. What happens often is that the money for I.e highways is contingent on X miles of bike lanes. Or school funding rests on the enactment of policies like trans rights and trans students in women’s restrooms.

It was funny but I don't like this sort of thing. It disturbs me that battle of the sexes has apparently become the leading interpretation of this election result, which is somewhat nonsensical given that Trump won White women. Men vs women strife is much worse than racial strife in my opinion (yes I understand that racial strife can lead to wars and genocides in a way that gender conflict doesn't, but I'm talking about at the non-violent levels we are currently experiencing). I've never had a conversation with a black person in my life, what do I care if they hate me? But I really would rather not see my family divided. I would much rather political battlelines become White vs non-White than man vs woman.

You know, I planned to write a comment that disagreed with you, but after looking into it, I've come to agree with you quite a lot. While there is a big gender gap, the more significant gap continues to be the racial gap. (But the gender gap among Latinos and African-Americans was particularly large -- no wonder Obama came out to try and get black men to vote for Harris!)

The real battle of the sexes story always seemed to me to be the success of Trump among younger men (older men and women were already locked-in): men 18-29 overall voted for Trump slightly more than Harris (49-47%), not just white men, but all of them together. Young women broke massively for Harris, though, 61-37%.

But then I dug a little deeper.

White men 18-29 voted 63%-35% (!) for Trump, white women 18-29 were split 49-49 (also a !). This should mollify all of us a little bit -- from media coverage you'd expect that young white women voted for Harris 80-20, but the reality is they were split down the middle. I'm fascinated by these young women -- where are they? Why aren't we hearing more from them? Would they have also shaved their heads if Harris had won? Perhaps there's hope for the younger men dumped by their girlfriends over voting for Trump after all. God bless America. 🇺🇸

I continue to believe there's some dark force out there trying to get men and women to hate each other. Ginsberg and Scott did very well appropriating the ancient Carthaginian demon, maybe there's some other evil creature whose name we could apply to the feminism-redpill-abortion-Tinder-FDS-Fuentes-industrial complex? Whatever it is, we need to kill it.

I'm fascinated by these young women -- where are they? Why aren't we hearing more from them?

I touched upon this earlier, but annecdotally, the mothers of young children, and women in stable relationships hoping to become mothers broke overwhelmingly for Trump, and again annecdotally a good part of that break seems to have come from the perception that the Democrats are the party of queer Tumblr bullshit.

The Trump add about Kamala being "the candidate of they and them not you" that was running in my neck of the woods for about a month prior to the election appears to have struck a cord. Afterall, would you trust this person with your kids? what about this person?

That linked comment of yours is about the Ukraine.

Odd, should be fixed now.

It disturbs me that battle of the sexes has apparently become the leading interpretation of this election result, which is somewhat nonsensical given that Trump won White women. Men vs women strife is much worse than racial strife in my opinion (yes I understand that racial strife can lead to wars and genocides in a way that gender conflict doesn't, but I'm talking about at the non-violent levels we are currently experiencing).

I wish there were a battle of the sexes instead of the one-sided bullying we've seen for the last 30 years. Men haven't even begun fighting back, they have just started to imply that further bullying might meet more resistance. The only blatantly anti-male policies we are thinking about rolling back are some of the more egregious instruments with which campus kangaroo courts are punishing the crime of men slighting their moral betters (something that the first Trump admin adressed which was then immediately reversed by Biden). And if Musk actually starts with his anti-bureaucracy crusade, we might lose some of the predominantly female sinecure positions. But that's about it. And women act as if they were thrown into that weird rape-fantasy of handmaid's tale.

for the last 30 years

In truth this has been closer to the last 150 years (when automation really began to replace men in the workforce, and reliably brought women's physical productivity to within [insert wage gap statistic here] of men's), but from August 1945 to some time in the late '70s female bullying could reliably be ignored.

We've had this problem for 5-6 generations; nobody's quite figured out how to crack it yet (lying flat is about the best men have been able to do).

But I really would rather not see my family divided. I would much rather political battlelines become White vs non-White than man vs woman.

...and this is the difference between you and people like Fuentes.

The boys are gloating to the liberal girls that their team won. They are doing this by inverting the liberal catch phrase (“my body my choice”) to indicate ownership and victory. Ownership, or dominance, is such a mainstay of young male speech that I don’t think it needs an example, but “you got own’d” is the most hilariously explicit version. “Sonning” or “been adopted” is what the teens are using to indicate that you’ve become the loser’s father, at least last I’ve checked. In the gaming days of old, players would simulate raping the dead enemy’s body and talk about the other team “getting raped”.

Kamala’s loss has given young boys the ultimate opportunity to boast. Her own catchphrase can be expertly inverted to indicate that the boys’ team won using a clear, in vogue signal of dominance (“I own you” + “get bodied” = “I own your body”). When I first saw Nick’s tweet I literally laughed, and I still can’t read the controversy without smiling, because it’s so decidedly non-serious. There’s no serious policy prescription to attach to the tweet. There’s no actual interest in controlling a woman’s body. It’s simple, childish making fun of the other gender’s party. The fact that it has 80 million views on Twitter and teachers are talking about their kids saying it is… sorry, it is very funny. It is infinitely more childish than whatever the news is saying about it to instill a moral panic.

Note that Nick’s audience is separate from the groups that actually successfully control women’s bodies, which are all the conservative religious groups, especially Muslims. Nick is not a cleric in charge of your local Salafi mosque (a group that no liberal will ever consider protesting), he’s a dude making edgy commentary to teenagers. He is against abortion because he wants a conservative sexual culture where men and women marry early. That isn’t anti-woman as he wants virginity for both men and women.

Nick’s audience is separate from the groups that actually successfully control women’s bodies

Is it? Nick has said he supports the Taliban's gender policies. I think he probably has a significant Muslim fanbase nowadays.

Muslims have their own edgy streamers, like someone named “Sneako”. Fuentes say “Christ is King” way too much for a devout Muslim audience

Lately I've noticed a Muslim talking point that Islam appreciates Jesus more than any other religion, and that Christians are essentially slightly misguided Muslims who Allah will save anyway. I get the impression that for a lot of these gen Z trad groypers, it's the anti-degeneracy part of religion that they care about, not the specifics of the theology. Hating on Muslims also seems to have become a little uncool in the alt-right, since it would put them on the same side as Israel.

Christians are essentially slightly misguided Muslims who Allah will save anyway

I’m intrigued; is this claim endorsed by any prominent mainstream Islamic theologians?

AFAIK, the sole requirement for conversion to Islam is sincerely believing in the Shahada, viz. that there is only one God and Muhammad is his messenger. Do Christians get partial credit for believing the first half? If so, what about Jews?

I heard that Muslims consider Jesus a genuine prophet and messenger, just not the Son of God. (Whereas Jews believe he was a maniac). So Christians are directionally correct, they just need to learn how important Mohammed is.

I believe Nick was responding (at least memetically, if not directly) at the barrage of Harris ads around reproductive which all ended with a sinister (of course old white) GOP politician saying "I got the most votes, it's my decision". Of course, those ads could have been crisper, they could have actually said "it's my choice" rather than "my decision" which would have been an appropriate anaphora.

And FWIW, pro-choice referendums ran >10 points better than Trump! So they were absolutely right that voters want reproductive freedom much more than they wanted Trump. Floridians voted 57% for abortion even though Trump won 56-43. Trump carried NV and AZ but they both passed abortion rights measures too.

So while Fuentes trolls the folks for whom reproductive freedom was a central plank of a losing battle, it's a double troll that he gets to claim that voters support him on the issue when ISTM that the issue wasn't as salient. Hence the split-ticket Trump+abortion voters.

the barrage of Harris ads around reproductive

The clever thing is, it's not a Harris ad. There's a nice little disclaimer at the end that it's not authorized by her campaign. So, of course, when anyone complains, it's not the Democratic Party or their politicians behind these ads, it's just totally unaffiliated randos!

There has to be a term for that (other than implausible deniability). I feel like I see it a lot with IdPol stuff: "Well, most Democratic politicians don't use LatinX, so you can't blame them for your workplace's employee group!"

It's a legal thing, spending on "issue ads" is treated differently in campaign finance law from explicitly endorsing a candidate.

I meant more that I often can't point to a specific politician endorsing a specific view, but that view is so promoted culturally that it just feels associated with them regardless.

This is explicitly the case - if you watch the video he put out about he goes on to say "I'm your republican congressman", a direct quote from those advertisements.

I suspect it's more that 2010s blog feminism succeeded admirably in clearing the field of anyone who cared. In both respects.

This is an earnest question: could you clarify this? I'm confused what exactly you're saying the field was cleared of and what it is they cared about.

If you chase off everyone who's emotionally vulnerable enough to be hurt, and also everyone who worried about hurting you to start with, you're left with the people who aren't either of those things.

Asymmetry isn't surprising under those circumstances. (And won't last if the same is also happening in the opposite direction. A much more complex question...)

Nick Fuentes doesn't even like girls. I don't just mean that he's a mysoginist. I don't even think he likes them sexually.

I'm certainly not going to say, "your body, my choice," is good rhetoric, but there is a kernel of reducto ad absurdam to it. It's saying, "Hey, y'all were the ones saying, 'my body, my choice,' was on the ballot. Y'all lost, so now by your own reasoning that means your body is my choice, because we won."

Nick Fuentes doesn't even like girls. I don't just mean that he's a mysoginist. I don't even think he likes them sexually.

Wasn't he confirmed as gay, or am I just getting him mixed up with other far-right figures?

(Wait, no, it was that he liked femboys, wasn't it?)

He hasn't been confirmed as gay, but screencaps of his gay porn browsing habits were accidentally released to the public and there are a lot of weird stories - I'm not going to explicitly detail the "Nick Fuentes: Cum Detective" story here for obvious reasons, but I give it a >90% chance that the guy who hates women, looks at shirtless images of athletic boys etc is gay.

First, why does it seem that the trolling and triggering in gender discourse is so asymmetric?

You have to understand the power asymmetry. The Women's side of the gender discourse is run by Women's Studies department with tenured professors. Low grade trolling is a bit beneath them. They don't want to trigger people like Groypers. They dislike being reminded of the continued existence of Fuentes and Tate.

Also trolling like that is an aggressive guy thing. The equivalent is probably that ex-teacher on Tik Tok who talks about politics in a pre school teacher voice like her viewers are small children.

The Women's side of the gender discourse is run by Women's Studies department with tenured professors. Low grade trolling is a bit beneath them.

/r/incel_tears has >300k members, of which I'd assume the majority are women. It's not exactly Groyper-style trolling, but I think that pointing at and laughing at miserable members of your outgroup comes from the same psychological space.

I just see it as a mockery/taunt. Obviously Democrats chose to make this election about abortion, under the slogan “my body, my choice.” It stands to reason that if Kamala lost, it must be “your body, my choice” (for some value of “my”). Sorry ladies, Democracy has spoken.

Anecdotally, this specific taunt seems to have absolutely found its mark. So many of the American women I'm acquainted with have been completely demented by this. Rather than see it for the taunting and trolling it is, they're shrieking about it being an "actual rape threat" -- I guess when the needs of your class are routinely addressed by those in power, you have an incentive to hysterically exaggerate every slight.

Nick did tweet it multiple times, and it's a type of trolling where it's hard to know if it's trolling or not, because it's credibly something he could mean. It could mean a return to the patriarchy. Or as mentioned above a sexual joke. Or just for lolz. All this does is play into the hand of the opposing side's worst possible framing, yet for memetic value it wins.

This is why Nick is so smart. He waited until after the election, knowing nothing could be done; making one's own team look bad with sexism is not a concern anymore. He was originally skeptical of Trump and hated Vance, so he's hedging his bets, and then after Trump wins, instead of looking dumb or a traitor by not voting for him, he one-ups everyone else by being MORE extreme so his supporters forget that he didn't vote for Trump. had Trump lost he could have just blamed Trump being a Zionist shill. So both bases covered.

Yeah, this hit our media too.

Are there good examples of the manosphere being successfully provoked in such a manner?

"KillAllMen" and "Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them" would be the obvious ones, although they're old. I will note that these didn't actually work out all that well for the provokers.

Tucker Carlson appearing on Joe Rogan experience speculated that UAPs are real, but are not alien visitors from other planets but supernatural in origin and always has been here. More recently he claimed to have been mauled by a demon in his sleep, which resulted in physical marks (more probable culprit - one of four dogs in the room?). His suspected demonic activity today - the invention of nuclear weapons:

I have never met a person who can isolate the moment when nuclear technology became known to man. So, where did it come from exactly? ... it's very clear to me these are demonic.

Why are apparently kooky beliefs entertained by top influencers on the right? Cadence Owens also came out as dinosaur truther and flat-earth curious.

Is Tucker trying to become the next Alex Jones? Is this part of an op to associate historical revisionism and opposition to the ruling regime with insanity?

Why are apparently cooky beliefs entertained by top influencers on the right?

Left-wing kooky beliefs aren't apparent, because it's the consensus narrative that supplies the "kooky" label, and they still maintain a nearly arbitrary degree of control over what the "consensus" is. "Men can be women" was an astonishingly kooky belief five minutes before you could get fired for disagreeing with it.

"Why is this thing I've been told I must laugh at so incredibly laughable?" Do you laugh at Simulation theory too?

I don't believe that men can be women either. I get where it comes from - the left believes in reality being socially constructed and in wise experts -, the more they freak out the normies the wiser. Trans stuff is amplified for depopulation purposes, to make money in the medical industrial complex, to give more power for government to intrude in the family, etc. Demons inventing nukes, now that's an interesting new delusion.

I don't believe that men can be women either

That's not an axiomatic belief, it's a derived belief based on your definitions of "man" and "woman," which in turn descend from your beliefs about the duties and privileges a society should afford to members of each sex, which in turn descend from your beliefs about the optimal way to organize society, which in turn descend from... and so on and so forth.

I hate to make this a bravery debate, but that statement doesn't actually convey anything concrete about your beliefs, it just marks you as part of a particular ingroup. If you taboo'd the words 'man,' 'woman,' 'male,' and 'female,' you could actually have a productive discussion with leftists about whether people should be empowerd to advertise their sexual preferences via their mode of dress... about how we should create divisions within sporting leagues to balance inter-competitor fairness, the enjoyment of the audience, the marketability of particular sports... about the minimum physical capabilities we want in our soldiers... and so on.

I doubt you'd change your mind, or the liberal's mind, but "men can't be women" and "everyone is valid" are both equivalently vacuous statements that boil down to, "my view on the ideal distribution of responsibility and privilege is correct."

That's not an axiomatic belief, it's a derived belief based on your definitions of "man" and "woman," which in turn descend from your beliefs about the duties and privileges a society should afford to members of each sex,

This is false. My definition of "man" and "woman" has nothing to do with duties and privileges a society should afford to members of each sex, and believing that it does already effectively means believing that men can be women relative to my definitions.

you could actually have a productive discussion with leftists about

To the extent you could have a reasonable exchange of ideas with a person like that, those ideas would not be representative of what is actually being pushed by their political establishment. This person would not acknowledge what the establishment is actually doing, instead they would constantly sane-wash it into something palatable. If you provide evidence that the sane-washed version ins't what's being pushed, and the version you're objecting to is, two things might happen depending on the temperament of the person: conversion ends, or they'll the thing they just swore isn't happening is actually good. I don't think that's a productive conversation.

You're assuming people here are siloed off in an echo-chamber. Please consider the possibility that we've been having these conversations for a long time, and what you claim simply does not fit our experience.

discussion with leftists

I doubt you'd change your mind, or the liberal's mind

Why are you conflating liberals with leftists?

This is false. My definition of "man" and "woman" has nothing to do with duties and privileges a society should afford to members of each sex,

Unless you want society to treat men and women exactly the same, then yes, it does. Alternatively, if you do want perfect egalitarianism, why do you care how "man" and "woman" are defined? They become just arbitrary streams of phonemes used to categorize different fuzzy phenomena, like arguing over whether a virus is "life" or "nonlife."

I'm a Roman Catholic. I care about the definition of "man" and "woman" because I believe men and women have different divinely-ordained privileges and duties. So as a society, it's important for us to define the meaning of those terms correctly so we can effectively promote said privileges and duties. But it would be ridiculous to expect, say, a Jain, to have the same idea of what those privileges and duties are, even if they concede that they exist in the first place. Their fundamental beliefs about the nature of god are wrong, and what I hope to change. But until I do, their derived beliefs are presumably self-consistent and therefore unassailable ... unless I can convince them that within their own moral framework, they should alter their behavior.

The same logic applies to convincing people who believe in gender self-identification*. You're making some claim that it's futile to meet them where they are because doing so doesn't shift them from supporting a particular political establishment... and you substantiate that claim by pointing to personal experience of debating people who support gender self-identification. But it's clear that you haven't been meeting them where they are, by the very fact that you're conceiving of this as a duel between opposing political establishments. There's a wide variety of underlying views about sex, gender, and culture which people negotiate in different ways. For just the bathroom-debate and sports-debate alone, you can come up with three different pro-transgender combinations that must necessarily derive from completely different worldviews. And since those three worldviews are part of the same political establishment, they're all fighting each other, all the time, on the inside of their filter bubbles. They each have some idea of what the "party line" is, and probably they all think it's wrong and they're right.

* I was using "leftist" and "liberal" as a shorthand for this, though I admit the groups don't all map onto each other.

Unless you want society to treat men and women exactly the same, then yes, it does.

No, sir. It doesn't matter whether we live under TradCath divinely ordained gender-complementarity, uno-reverso Amazonian matriarchy, or full-blown egalitarianism, my definition of "man" and "woman" stays exactly the same. My views on what their rights and duties are may vary, but a man is a man under TradCathism, matriarchy, or egalitarianism, and a woman is a woman under all 3 as well.

But it's clear that you haven't been meeting them where they are, by the very fact that you're conceiving of this as a duel between opposing political establishments. There's a wide variety of underlying views about sex, gender, and culture which people negotiate in different ways.

I don't see how my conception of this exchange means I'm not meeting them where they are. Even the most unpopular policies from your list are currently in place and active all throughout the west, which means where the liberals currently are has little relevance on the rules imposed on us. That is determined by their political establishment, not by them. What's more, once they realize their views don't conform to their establishments, like I said, they will either drop off from the conversation, or turn on a dime, and endorse the establishment view.

  • I was using "leftist" and "liberal" as a shorthand for this, though I admit the groups don't all map onto each other.

Which is quite a bit of an issue. I rate my chances of having a reasonable (though not necessarily productive) conversation with a liberal, far higher than I do with a leftist (unless it's one of those old-school /r/stupidpol types)

my definition of "man" and "woman" stays exactly the same

Then you have confused the map for the territory. There's no point litigating what a "man" and a "woman" is just to change an entry in a dictionary. A definition is a tool, constructed to serve some particular personal or social end. If your definitions do not change when your goals and understanding of the world do, they are useless. If your definitions do not influence how you think and act, they are useless. Definitions do not exist in an abstract void-- they are the cognitive tools with which we understand and classify the world, so we can come to particular decisions and conclusions.

I don't see how my conception of this exchange means I'm not meeting them where they are. Even the most unpopular policies from your list are currently in place and active all throughout the west, which means where the liberals currently are has little relevance on the rules imposed on us. That is determined by their political establishment, not by them. What's more, once they realize their views don't conform to their establishments, like I said, they will either drop off from the conversation, or turn on a dime, and endorse the establishment view.

It looks like you still think, "meeting them were they are" means discussing the same object-level policy preference. (In this case, things like, "should transgender women be allowed in women's sports.) But that's way above the level of discussion I'm talking about! Before you can have a productive conversation about that, you need to have a conversation about what a "man" and a "woman" are... and before you can have a conversation about that, you need to have a conversation about why you would want to define the terms "man and woman" in the first place, and what goals we're trying to achieve by creating these definitions. That is to say, you need to have to conversation we're having right now.

If you just come at it from the level of, "men can't be women," and then try to have a discussion about the bathroom question, of course it's going to be unproductive. You say, "the political consensus you support wants trans women in bathrooms, but you don't," and think you're pointing out a contradiction between what they believe and what the establishment believes about the nature of men and women. But instead, they're just going to assume that they share the same fundamental values with their establishment, and consequently that said establishment (that they trust more than you) must have some information they don't about how allowing trans women in bathrooms actually serves that shared fundamental value better. No wonder you walk away frustrated!

There's no point litigating what a "man" and a "woman" is just to change an entry in a dictionary. A definition is a tool, constructed to serve some particular personal or social end. If your definitions do not change when your goals and understanding of the world do, they are useless.

On the contrary, definitions shouldn't be put the in service of a particular goal, they're basic building-blocks of sense-making. I can have different personal and/or social ends, and a constant definition makes it a lot easier to reason about which ones are more desiderable for me. It's the fluid definition that's useless.

Also, I think this pretty much vindicates my earlier prediction that your definition effectively means you think men can be women.

It looks like you still think, "meeting them were they are" means discussing the same object-level policy preference.

No, I don't. Their actions regarding policies are just a verification mechanism for whether or not I met them where they are.

But that's way above the level of discussion I'm talking about! Before you can have a productive conversation about that, you need to have a conversation about what a "man" and a "woman" are...

First of all, do you have any idea how evasive progressives are about this question? There's literally a movie about it

Secondly, actually according to your approach to definitions, trying to decouple definitions from personal and social ends (i.e.: "object-level policy preferences") is pointless, because definitions are put them in order to reach a particular end to begin with. You literally say that in the following sentence.

If you just come at it from the level of, "men can't be women," and then try to have a discussion about the bathroom question, of course it's going to be unproductive.

Sorry, but you're not meeting me where I am. That's not how I approach these conversations at all. I can argue for my position even after tabooing all those words, like you originally suggested.

and consequently that said establishment (that they trust more than you) must have some information they don't about how allowing trans women in bathrooms actually serves that shared fundamental value better.

That's perfectly fine though, but if it's the case, is it too much for them to just say that?

By the way, you seem pretty convinced that you understand mine, and the hypothetical progressive's approach very well. What would the world have to look like for you to change your mind, and end up believing that my description of how progressives think is more accurate?

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That's a bunch of postmodern second-hand lesswrong rhetoric meant to let the camel's nose into the tent. Now the camel is halfway in and kids are being sterilised and/or taken away from parents who "don't affirm their gender". Let's get the camel back out.

You're trying to fix the debate around your particular framing, but if you are actually correct that's wholly unnecessary.

And anyways, convincing people to have a "traditional" views about what a man and women are doesn't even prevent kids being sterilized or being abducted from their parents. So it's doubly useless to argue from a position of privileging your own moral framework. You not only fail to convince people to adopt said framework, you also fail to make progress on the object level issue.

Here's an example: I was arguing with my girlfriend about transgender people in women's sports. She's "pro," I'm a muddled sort of "anti."* I eventually discovered she held her position because she genuinely didn't believe that men had any advantage over women besides height and weight-- and that existing sex segregation was actually the result of discrimination against women. She actually thought women would do fine in men's sports, if they weren't excluded from tryouts, or something. So none of my appeals to fairness, or justice, or even entertainment value were working on her, because they were all made from a framing that she viewed as essentially incoherent. I eventually got her to concede that, were we to have true co-ed competitions at an elite level, and men consistently won, then it would make sense to keep males, including transgender ones, out of women's sports.

That's what it took to get the object-level issue resolved, and in the process I saw that currently-intransversible gap between our frameworks. Before I can even get her to care about the higher male genetic propensity for sexual assault, I'd need to convince her it was genetic in the first place, rather than culturally mediated. And in particular, to someone who believes most observed differences between sexes are due to cultural factors rather than genetic, it would seem trivially obvious that changing their cultural presentation of gender is changing their gender, because gender is all culture in the first place.

Anyways, altering your body is a natural right, in that it has no external victims and requires active government intervention to stop. Natural rights can be exercised poorly, but that doesn't stop us from having them. Parents have a justifiable authority to restrict the rights of their children, but the government doesn't have that right on their behalf. By the same token, government doesn't have leave to interfere with a parent's justifiable authority to restrict the rights of their child. So the hypothetical people you're arguing with are wrong, but you are too.

* I don't think "transgender women are women," but also I'm not really in favor of women's sports? So it's like, whatever to me. I don't judge sporting organizations for just doing whatever is going to get them the most viewers and therefore the most money.

I eventually discovered she held her position because she genuinely didn't believe that men had any advantage over women besides height and weight-- and that existing sex segregation was actually the result of discrimination against women.

Well, that's just plain nuts.

Parents have a justifiable authority to restrict the rights of their children, but the government doesn't have that right on their behalf.

Why not? It bans tattoos for kids and FGM. Preventing child abuse is one legitimate government functions under minarchism, so if government is to exist at all it should do that.

Well, that's just plain nuts.

Yeah, she's smart but also kind of naive. Honestly I think it's cute, and ironical male cynic + female idealist is a very functional set of traditional gender roles.

Why not? It bans tattoos for kids and FGM. Preventing child abuse is one legitimate government functions under minarchism, so if government is to exist at all it should do that.

Parents have the justifiable authority to restrict rights, not to violate them. People have the right to, say, cut off their thumbs as a political protest. Parents should justifiably be empowered to prevent their kids from doing so. Parents do no have the right to cut off their child's thumbs as a political protest. Parents can assent to their kid wanting to cut off their own thumbs-- but in cases like this, where it's unlikely that the average child would actually ever want their thumbs cut off, it would be justifiable for the government to introduce intermediaries (child psychologists, judges) to mediate whether the child had genuinely come to desire that of their own volition and with an understanding of the costs and benefits.

With regards to cutting-off-thumbs specifically I suspect the intermediaries would almost always find against letting the child cut off their thumbs, and additionally find evidence of child abuse... but for less clear-cut (hah!) scenarios, like administering hormone blockers, tattoos, and sweet-sixteen double eyelid surgery, I could see the intermediaries allowing the procedure in many cases.

I believe none of those are the reasons, though they're close.

for depopulation purposes

It's not "in order to depopulate", it's "because we don't hold population as a virtue, it fails to apply as an argument to prevent this".

to make money in the medical industry

You think the average leftist cares about making big medical companies money?

to give more power for government to intrude in the family

I think this is a general mistake with attributing intentions to other people. Leftists don't think trans is good because it lets them strengthen the government's intrusion, they think the government being able to intrude is good because it lets them support trans kids.

If X has the result of "Y", while you think "anti-Y", it's common to say "they're doing X to support Y." But those disagreements are very often a question of relative ranking of X and Y; it's usually "they think X is more important than Y, so that they will accept an anti-Y result to bolster X". Compare pro-life vs anti-life, pro-choice vs anti-choice.

There are both true believers and cynical actors pushing any particular policy, like bootleggers and baptists both being pro prohibition as a classical example.

Well sure, but it's still wrong to say that baptists are pro-smuggling.

Again, do you laugh at Simulation Theory? It used to be a reasonably high-status talking point in the rationalist community.

No.

Fundamentalist Christian memes being used as explanations by people who may not 100% practice fundamentalist Christianity is not that odd. These are elites but not part of respectable society, after all.

EDITED FOR CLARITY.

I don't think anyone claims that 'men can be women' per se.

The left just happens to disagree with your assertion that 'anyone born with male parts is and will always be a man.' This is not saying 'men can be women' so much as 'you are wrong about who is a man and who is a woman.' The standard view on the left, as I understand it, is that if John Doe comes out as a transwoman (changing her name to Jane Doe), then Jane Doe was always a woman, and our (and her) previous belief that she was a man was an error of fact, and mutatis mutandis for transmen.

People who have Read The Sequences, on the other hand, hold that 'man' and 'woman' are an inaccurate map of a more complicated territory, and their definitions depend on which hidden inference one is asking about.

I don't think anyone claims that 'men can be women' per se.

If I find examples of people who do appear to be claiming that men can be women per se, would you change your mind? For example, people who insist that someone who was universally regarded as a man ten years ago is in the present a woman, without qualifiers?

More generally, intellectual embroidery is, I think, how the transition from "kooky" to "consensus" is achieved. Reality contains infinite, fractal complexity; we emphasize or elide that infinite complexity as needed to conform what we see to what we think.

If I find examples of people who do appear to be claiming that men can be women per se, would you change your mind? For example, people who insist that someone who was universally regarded as a man ten years ago is in the present a woman

But this is arguing that "universal regard" is the definition of gender. Those sorts of assumptions are exactly what is being disagreed with. That's why there's "assigned gender at birth".

"Assigned gender at birth" can rescue you if you have a pre-transition person that already wants to change their gender, but it won't when "universally regarded" includes the person in question themselves. If they denied that men can be women, that would mean someone who changed their mind later on either has always been a woman, or that they're not a woman now, which pro-trans people don't believe.

I think the way to rescue this is to hold that a person has privileged insight into their own gender but can still be mistaken.

The existence of post-transition trans people who are by their account much less in conflict with their gender perception demonstrates that that there is sometimes privileged insight that is true, or at least beneficial to assume. The existence of trans people who detransition doesn't disprove the existence of those people, it merely establishes that the correlation isn't perfect.

people who have Read The Sequences hold that 'man' and 'woman' are an inaccurate map of a more complicated territory

The left != people who have Read The Sequences. Also, I don't see how this idea is any less kooky.

The left != people who have Read The Sequences.

I was referring to them as separate groups, but will edit for clarity.

Trans rationale is just a rhetorical three cup trick where the desired outcome is slipped underneath whichever restlessly rotating definition suits the advocate. They'll say whatever improves their position. If it's "men can be women" that's what they'll say, and if you argue that men can't be women they'll slip the ball under a different cup. The left plays the role of the stooge, be that willing or unwillingly.

There has always been an element of the intelligence community plugged into weird supernaturalist subcultures involving UFOs and poltergeists and the like; some of you may remember Jason Jorjani and the attempt to legitimize (and co-opt) the derogatory term of the ‘alt-right’ pre-Charlottesville and its connection to Spencer, Bannon, and the like. The whole interesting part of that affair that many ignore would be the fact that Jorjani testifies to an MI-6 agent tied to Erik Prince originally roping him into that mess under the pretenses of being a “British member of the Vril Society” whose interests involved back-engineering Nazi time-travel tech. The field of UFOlogy speaks of rumors of high-ranking evangelical intelligence officials whose far-reaching and high-impact beliefs include the claims of UFOs being demons attempting to deceive the world into apostatizing from the true faith of Christ Jesus™ (Protestant Christianity), and Michael Flynn (the previous director of the DIA) being at least a certain type of person who gets power in those positions isn’t exactly lending any credence against opposing viewpoints.

Tucker might be an extension of the same belief system, insofar as this isn’t intended as some psychological operation on the part of whomever believes in the specific claims thereof (most Christians, like Tucker, believe in some version of them), but it might unintentionally act as one. That some intelligence operatives are using this to their betterment has no doubt, but that then goes to the general question of most psyop-based explanations for the current UFO craze: why? Why push demon-aliens in flying discs zapping people? It doesn’t make that much sense.

One of the most enduring constants in UFOlogy is that people who go down the UFO rabbit hole often find that it stares back (yeah yeah it's a horrible mixed metaphor.) I uh didn't realize that Erik Prince had been tied to back-engineering Nazi time-travel technology, though, so thanks for the spare link to peruse.

UFOs are very interesting because the intelligence agencies either have pretty hard proof or they don't, but I find it interesting that there does seem to be such an overlap within the intelligence community between people who are "into" UFOs and people who are "into" stuff like poltergeists. If you had e.g. satellite imagery of a UFO reentering the atmosphere, presumably you wouldn't connect that to woo stuff like remote viewing, but we live in a world with people like Hal Putoff and Lue Elizondo.

Makes you wonder what they know (Grush referred to UFOs as "inter-dimensional," which has been the conjecture of leading UFOlogists like Jacques Vallee – who of course has his own ties to intelligence agencies) – or if they don't know and it's just weird topics attract weird thinkers.

I suspect there's actually something to the weird, but I think it's also important to note that a good intelligence operative is probably very good at making connections between seemingly unrelated things. Seems quite likely that intelligence agencies are brim-full of people who are very good at reading a lot into very small amounts of data, which pays of spectacularly when they're right...and also when they're wrong.

I uh didn't realize that Erik Prince had been tied to back-engineering Nazi time-travel technology, though, so thanks for the spare link to peruse.

It’s pretty funny to word it that way, but you should also probably watch the opening segments of this new interview of Jorjani when you have the time even if a lot of the things said in it is batshit crazy. Any conspiracy you can imagine, he touches on; remote viewing, time-traveling Nazi breakaway-civilizations, crash-retrieval UFO programs, future unaligned ASI simulating our pasts, etc. are not spared. The crazy thing is the fact that this guy had Steve Bannon’s ear and was clearly involved in intelligence to the point where he got his blackmail telegraphed on the New York Times even as he was basically an unknown philosophy professor in the public eye beforehand.

Which raises the point of how there are intelligence operatives and contacts saying things like what Jorjani says without batting an eye. David Grusch was involved with briefing the NSC and the President on behalf of the NRO and then says the government has knowledge of the afterlife and interdimensional lifeforms. Whatever is going on, it’s not just your run-of-the-mill false flag.

Uh, it seems plausible to me that intelligence agencies actually select for the kinds of guys that wind up getting into this stuff. Like intelligence work is basically looking for a much more boring version.

It’s not a coincidence that the CIA recruits a lot of Mormons from BYU, either, due to their lifestyle and loyalty choices; Mormons also coincidentally believe that there exists a race of infinitely many nordic-looking Supermen all living on their on planets, and that Joseph Smith upon receiving his first revelation from two of these beings was knocked effectively unconscious (not unlike many contactee experiences).

That’s a long-winded point to saying ‘you’re right’, by the by, but it’s just another piece of data that makes all these things weird (as the alien contactee experience, as independent from the causal influence of Mormonism, was something the IC legitimately investigated in the 50s.)

I've theorized for some time that one reason why intelligence agency types and pilots tend to be so into UFO stuff and believe UFO lore explanations for potentially more mundane elements is precisely because that's the type of a profession you get into if you want to "learn the truth", make first contact, get into space to see the secret alien moonbase and so on. In intelligence agency types you get into more of an X-Files territory, in case of pilots it's more like getting into astronaut training and then enacting Rendezvous with Rama.

The best theory continues being that the US government employs a lot of people and does not actually have very strong gatekeeping, so weirdos (of the type that would convince themselves that they have seen UFO evidence, or perhaps make up a story for grift/wishful thinking and come to believe it for real) can get in and thrive. Every time these characters (Lazar, Elizondo, Grusch...) are brought up, what jumps out at me is how obviously different their manner of speech and even their names sound from "serious" members of the US military that are quoted on "serious" topics - the Mearsheimers, Gradies and Saltzmans, inevitably of Jewish, Nordic or sometimes Irish extraction, patrician-sounding first names and middle initials. This alone suggests that there is some ethnic-cultural divide at play here, and the UFO crowd might be different enough from normal spokespeople that heuristics of trustworthiness and willingness to make stuff up which were trained on official communication would not actually be valid.

Christopher K. Mellon (former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Irish descent) doesn't just have a patrician-sounding first name and middle initial, he's a member of an old patrician family (the Mellons), and he's one of the main drivers on the UAP topic. John Ratcliffe (former Director of National Intelligence, English extraction I guess?), John Brennan (former Director of the CIA, Irish descent), H.R. McMaster (former National Security Advisor, Scottish extraction I presume), Avril Haines (Director of National Intelligence, Jewish on her mother's side), Mark A. Milley (Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Irish), Timothy Gallaudet (Rear Admiral US Navy, French extraction I guess?), and Harald Malmgren (senior aide to Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Nordic) have all publicly indicated that they take the UAP issue seriously, although some of them, like Haines and Milley, might feel under pressure from Congress to do so.

From what I've seen, the ethno-cultural divide, if there is one, are that the ones that I would view as patrician-types are often more refined in their presentation. Mellon is careful about what he says, although he indicates that he thinks that UAP are real and a serious concern. Haines, Milley, and McMaster say things like "there are puzzling things out there that we don't understand and are hard to get to the bottom of," Ratcliffe and Gallaudet refer to having seen direct video/photographic evidence, Brennan circumspectly suggests that UAP might be a type of life, and Malmgren – who is now almost 90 – decided to go on Twitter and tell the world that he was told about "otherworld technologies" by Richard Bissel (of the CIA and NRO). Perhaps Malmgren behaves a bit differently because (he says) he was never under an official oath – Bissel spoke to him informally. But I'd be genuinely interested in which of the above people you classify as "serious" and which you don't – I'm very interested in American ethnography, and it would make my day if you did an assessment of them.

On the UFO topic, I am inclined to agree that normal "heuristics of trustworthiness and willingness to make stuff up" don't apply. But I don't think that they apply to "serious" members of the US military on this topic either. People who are cleared into SAPs (special access programs) are, apparently, supposed to lie if directly asked about a SAP they are cleared into, and most of the people on the above list are or have been read into such programs. UFO fans often assume that this means that the people in the military who talk about UFOs are telling the truth and the people who are denying knowledge of them are lying, but I would remind people that the knife of deception may cut both ways.

Hm. Certainly cause for an update if accurate, but do these people make the same claims as the "little grey men" crowd around the people that I mentioned? My impression was that there was a separate push a few years ago around the "Tic Tac" videos, which was much more measured and ambiguous and had the vibes of some intel operation that is too 8D-chessy for me to understand, rather than actual hints of confirmed aliens. (Baiting someone into revealing or believing something? My favourite theory at the time was that some branch of the USG wanted to signal to the PRC that they may have developed tech for spoofing input to/coherently dazzling complex integrated sensor systems, by way of using it on their own during a training exercise) It makes sense that that sort of undertaking would get fire support from real top brass. Did any of the people you listed directly vouch for any member of the batch that I mentioned?

Off the top of my head (so I might get a few details wrong):

The Tic Tac videos were (essentially) an intel operation – it was Mellon, Elizondo and Company getting the UAP topic into the New York Times and into the public discourse. The actual incident had been publicly discussed (and IIRC even video footage released) well before it made it into the Times, but Team Mellon was able to get the footage released with a chain of custody and get their narrative into the big leagues. The goal of the operation (ostensibly) was to get people to take the UAP topic seriously. If there's a psyop, it seems to lead straight into the little grey men territory rather than just showing off advanced technology (although of course the US of A might want China to think it has a crashed flying saucer...)

  • Mellon wrote the forward to Lue's book. He's not necessarily vouching for all of the claims, but he seems to take them seriously. This is notable in my mind since he probably was behind the scenes helping write Congressional legislation around this stuff, and if you look at what Congress has been drafting it has, unironically, been stuff along the lines of "GIVE US THE ALIEN CRAFT."
  • Milley/Haines/McMaster/Brennan seem more to take e.g. the issue seriously, but haven't to my knowledge made claims along the lines of Grush or Elizondo. I believe Haines was open to the possibility of ET life being responsible for UAP sightings, and Brennan suggested UAP might be (or be the product of?) some form of life.
  • Ratcliffe basically said "we're picking up crazy signatures from classified intelligence capabilities" (I think he at least implied recon satellites, but he may have stated it outright.) I'm not as familiar with what Gallaudet said, but I think it was along similar lines – he had seen good footage or other evidence during his time in the navy. He might be open to the "little grey men" stuff but I don't think he claims to have firsthand experience.
  • I assume Malmgren used the term "otherworld technologies" on purpose. He said his informal briefing was "60+" years ago, so if there's an op to fool the PRC it's gone back decades (perhaps involving the 1952 UFO flap over D.C. and the 1971 treaty we signed with the USSR that mentions the risk from unidentified objects on early warning radars? Interestingly Nixon was president in '71, I wonder if Malmgren was involved in that treaty.) Note that Malmgren has said he has no firsthand experience, it seems like (he claims) Bissel informally brought him up to speed in case it ever came up. Which of course raises the possibility that Bissel was just lying (or of course that Malmgren is lying, but I dunno why he would bother).

What puts me off of UAPs and the idea that “they have proof” is just how little physical evidence of life, not intelligent life, just plain ordinary life, exists. The best the Pro-UAP can do is a plausible fossilized bacteria sample found on Mars. They have no ships, megastructures, signals, planets with obvious life-signs. It doesn’t surprise me that people into UAPs are into non physical phenomena as they need some plausible way to explain how these things exist without leaving physical proof.

I think the idea that UAP are necessarily connected to extraterrestrial lifeforms is wrong. We could have a ship full of dead bodies in a hangar at Area 51 and still have no proof of extraterrestrial life. Likewise, if we detect a megastructure around a nearby star that's the product of alien life, it doesn't prove anything about UAP.

This thread you started is fascinating btw, just thanking you.

Personally I'm starting to believe demons might actually exist. Who knows?

The space of possible minds is exceedingly large; the space of possible disembodied minds (if such a thing is granted as possible) seems much more vast than embodied minds purely mathematically given the limitations of the permutations of matter; if Yudkowsky is correct, the vast majority of mind-space is populated by hopelessly alien minds operating on opaque decision-theories; if Scott is correct, the vast majority of actualized civilizations taken randomly from the space of all possible minds fall victim to an inexorable entropic coordination problem which isn’t just limited to embodied minds, but also disembodied ones (cf. acausal trade); depending on your theory of anthropics, coordination problems in universes with vaster mind-spaces would be preferred over ones with smaller mind-spaces, etc.

You can also tie this into simulation arguments, extortion from counterfactual agents, or whatever else, to create whatever rational™ defense of “non-local molochian agents” you want, but if it walks like a demon and talks like a demon, it probably is a demon. Jonathan Pageau analogizes the EA metaphor for picking the right mind out of a vast mindspace of minds oriented towards the great-filter of Moloch (what Yudkowsky posits as “demon summoning”, which is much easier than “angel summoning”) as “Sauron building his body from the corruptive power of the ring” which isn’t that far off from the more recondite discussions of alignment I’ve seen.

If you’re interested in alien minds, you might want to investigate Catholic doctrines on the psychology of angels.

I’m somewhat familiar with that from what I’ve read from St. Maximus and Fr. Lagrange; do you have any recommendations?

Commenting here so I can also get the recommendations.

(I love collecting somewhat strange books like this)

I don't normally post AI summaries, but this one is unsettling:

"Key aspects of angelic psychology in Catholic doctrine include:

"Intellect and Knowledge

  • Angels possess pure intellect without need for sensory input
  • They understand through direct intuition rather than reasoning from premises to conclusions
  • Their knowledge is innate rather than learned over time
  • They cannot change their minds once they've made a decision (hence the permanence of Lucifer's rebellion)

Time and Consciousness

  • Angels exist outside physical time but can interact with temporal events
  • Their consciousness is not sequential like human thought
  • They can apprehend multiple concepts simultaneously rather than sequentially

Would you like me to elaborate on any of these aspects? I find the medieval philosophical arguments about how pure intelligences might function to be particularly fascinating."

Excuse me. I'm going to have to inspect my CUDA code for signs of the holy ghost.

The text above describes a mind eerily similar to the ones we summon transiently in LLM activations.

"Let's think step by step," the angel said dubiously.

Okay yes but they don't actually visit us. Even if this is all true, the people seeing demons in this worldline are still crazy.

The CIA literally has an occult warfare division (MK OFTEN) and maintained specialized units of remote viewers for years. Some of the intelligence they provided was actually acted upon by the military in various conflicts: they found an American general kidnapped by Red Army Faction during the Years of Lead in Italy. They gave information about new types of Soviet nuclear submarines to the Navy. They identified locations of Iraqi surface to air missile sites during the Gulf War. Given all that I could see why someone who had ties to the intelligence community like Tucker Carlson might not immediately write off the existence of demons.

"has"? it was halted in 1973, unless you think the government is simply lying about everything and doing it secretly with no evidence.

“Dissolving” and reconstituting programs in a shell game to avoid oversight is an intelligence agency staple.

I don’t disagree with you. There is at least some overlap between the intelligence community’s contacts and superficial voices pushing the narrative of Havana Syndrome (i.e., microwave mind control weaponry) and the ones involved in the UFO field, too. The main pioneer of the aforementioned microwave weapons for the DIA (John Alexander) had his hand directly in the DoD’s parapsychological contractual studies before they were shut down, and these are the type of people Tucker would be aware of (and also wary of) in not only his skepticism of the IC but also his personal relation to it in his family.

But did the intelligence really come from clairvoyants, or was that a cover to distract the enemy from trying to find which one of them was selling secrets to the Americans? I vaguely recall that the British laundered some of the ENIGMA decryptions via this method....

Woah how have I never heard of all this stuff before? Incredible.

Yeah I strongly believe that there's some ESP/magical stuff they found out and keep under wraps.

Many (most?) complex civilizations “believed in” personifications of bad behavioral inclinations and social forces, and they called them evil spirits or demons. IMO the utility of personifying invisible forces is that humans are excellent at memorizing characters with personalities, but not lists of assertions or principles. It’s easier to persuade oneself not to eat too much cake when it’s a question of obeying an ugly demon who tempts you with thoughts and who has tempted you before, versus some hazy self-negotiation involving delayed gratification and self-reward. Demons also center a person’s moral identity: your true identity always wants the longterm good, and the demons are what tempt you (not “another part of me wants…” which is sort of depersonalizing). If the intel community is religious and interested in civilization-crafting then maybe they want to bring back angels and demons? Linking UFOs to unknown forces takes the public’s interests away from futuristic cia crafts and onto spiritual concerns. Plausibly, the same org that is so high-tech that it can make UFOs is also so smart that they see no merit in a population overly concerned with mind-boggling military technology.

This is somewhat similar as a hypothesis to what’s been floated in terms of all these things being engineered to increase the religiosity of the nation in order to save as many souls as possible in the long-term (and also to defend against the ‘ultimate deception’ of the antichrist). Nick Redfern’s Final Events has a similar perspective to this in terms of being in contact with a group within the intelligence community that actually believes that this is the right thing to do, and what ought to happen, due to their belief that there actually does exist a real unexplainable phenomenon deemed to be “extraterrestrial” by the larger populace that is actually demonic in nature. Incidentally, the late Old Testament scholar Michael Heiser believed he had encountered the same group of intelligence officers going to various theologians and airing their conflicting feelings about what they had done in such an affair. Whatever’s happening, it’s probably at minimum as weird as Michael Flynn going on camera with his family saying the QAnon oath and never elaborating. (Based?)

Candace Owens is into the weirder end of YEC. This is epicycles on an established set of beliefs that are mandatory among a particular subset of the population. Really, you’re surprised that YEC epicycle beliefs are common among far right pundits?

Claiming demonic experiences is also common-ish among very conservative Christians, so tucker getting into this stuff isn’t strange.

Candace Owens is into the weirder end of YEC.

I believe there's nothing genuine at all in Candace Owens' public persona, no genuine belief to analyze there at all.

She suddenly appeared as a "personality" during Gamergate when she tried to claim some ground on the anti-Gamergate side, found herself run out of it after encroaching on another leftist grifter's turf, realized that there's much more alpha in being a black woman right-winger, so after a week she came back as a pro-Gamergate grifter instead.

Someone genuinely moving from one side to the other is certainly possible, but I'm deeply suspicious one would do it within a week. It took me years. Hence since then I just dismiss her as an obvious grifter.

She made some high-commitment lifestyle changes since then, though. Someone in her position getting into YEC esoterica and Holocaust denial out of general historical revisionism is basically what I would expect if those changes were genuine. She’ll be tweeting about ancient Atlantean colonies on mars any day now.

She married a handsome Englishman with a big country house and a hundred million dollar inheritance coming down the pipeline. I suppose that counts as “high commitment”, but my guess is that both the before Candace and the after Candace would have taken that deal, politics aside. The Holocaust denial, YEC conspiracies and extreme esoteric weird online stuff seems more a consequence of being at home in a foreign country with a phone and babies for company; even her father in law denounced the antisemitism quite publicly, so I think it’s more on her than on her tradcath milieu for now.

The Holocaust denial, YEC conspiracies and extreme esoteric weird online stuff seems more a consequence of being at home in a foreign country with a phone and babies for company;

Man, when did kids go from asking why is the sky blue to "I don't get it, mama, how can you dispose of so many bodies in such short time? They didn't have enough crematoriums in Auschwitz, it makes no sense, mama!"?

Funny, but you know what I mean, she was already a clearly ultra-online person and in my experience new mothers at home with babies often go even deeper into whatever very online space they were in before they gave birth. Usually this is just celebrity gossip, astrology woo, fanfiction, a video game, whatever, but in Candace’s case it was clearly the schizo side of DR twitter (presumably she avoided the mainstream side because of racism) which intersects heavily with the Alex Jones verse, which itself intersects with YEC, David Ike lizard people, flat earth etc.

I totally believe this but she’s also buying into the kind of schizophrenia you get in the actual IRL tradcath esoteric paranoid schizo verse, very specifically.

tradcath esoteric paranoid schizo verse

Any rec's on twitter accounts or blogs I can follow for lulz. This is kind of turning into my soap opera stand-in.

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Wait, you're telling me Cadence Owens is with the Schizocore Hyperboria video crowd now?

Funny, but you know what I mean,

Yes, but I like my version better.

I think these people have been in the spotlight for so long, mouthing other peoples opinions or regurgitating talking points, that when they are finally allowed to be themselves they don't know where and when to stop. They already stepped over the line to follow their convictions. That line was much clearer and held more immediate consequences than belief in flat earth Satan bigfoot or whatever.

If everyone gave an earnest list of views they hold or are curious about or share any sort of odd thing that gave them an emotion that they felt was worth exploring the umpteenth time they have to fill 30 minutes of dead air I think there is not a single interesting person left that doesn't hold to some odd belief. Hell, most people are so uninteresting that they would never get to a point of being a political talking head in the first place.

On the flipside, the lunacy people believe on 'the left' is no different. As an example: most people believe in a theory of human evolution that's much dumber, consequential and more immediately and obviously wrong than flat earth.

But more directly to Tucker, it feels like he's throwing away a sort of sacred status he built for himself. He could always present himself as kind of untouchable. From a persona perspective it's like he decided to give himself a weakspot. Feels like an odd thing to do for a man like him but, barring it being a conspiracy by TPTB to weaken a persona that's becoming too powerful, it's just a whatever.

As an example: most people believe in a theory of human evolution that's much dumber, consequential and more immediately and obviously wrong than flat earth.

I get that its fashionable in this space to dunk on the "blank slatists" but this is a pretty dumb take that seriously oversells the rigor or "hardness" of fields like psychology and anthropology while underselling the significance of things like basic navigation, land surveys, and wireless communications to modern society, or the disciplines of physics and astronomy historically.

The spherical nature of the Earth along with its approximate circumference has been widely known in the western world since classical antiquity, and to the degree that flat-eartherism exists today outside of a "birds aren't real"-esque joke it seems most prevalent amongst PMC types who, interacting with the world chiefly through screens, seem to have difficulty thinking in three dimensions.

Contra the popular meme, 15th century sceptics weren't expecting Columbus to literally "sail off the edge of the earth" they were expecting him to run out of food and potable water before he even got a third of the way as the approximate latitude and longitude of the spice islands he was trying to reach had already been well established. Furthermore the sceptics were entirely correct in that it was essentially blind luck that Columbus stumbled upon the hear-to undiscovered island chain of the Bahamas just as his supplies were running low.

to the degree that flat-eartherism exists today outside of a "birds aren't real"-esque joke it seems most prevalent amongst PMC types who, interacting with the world chiefly through screens, seem to have difficulty thinking in three dimensions.

This is not my experience at all. Aside from the vanishingly small minority that is flat-earth for religious reasons, most of the flat earth people very much do not seem like PMC types, they're fiercely independent, self-reliant men with libertarian leanings who don't like appeals to authority and believe in seeing things for themselves before they're satisfied.

In other words, I think it's much more likely we'd see a flat earther here on the motte than in any PMC office, even if everyone made their beliefs completely transparent.

Agreed. The typical flat earth believer is very low in socioeconomic status, bordering on underclass, doesn’t believe what he’s told just in general, and winds up with a web or conspiracy theories which might contradict each other. He(and it’s a he) is about equally likely to be white or black(I’m not sure if this means blacks are overrepresented once you adjust for the very low socioeconomic status involved) and whether or not he claims to be a believer he never goes to church or prays, nor does he let Christianity influence his ethics or spirituality if he even has any. He’s deeply cynical about human relationships- in every sense of the term- and might use this to justify some mildly unethical behavior. He didn’t do well in school, even when you adjust for IQ, for the same reason his boss doesn’t like him now, and he tends to go from job to job without settling in a career. He believes a complex and often contradictory tangle of health/scientific, historical, economic, and possibly legal and supernatural-ish woo woo crap, but it’s not all natural or traditional. He might be a bit racist, but he hates rich people and authorities more. The police are out to get him(and it’s possible that they actually are), and he doesn’t connect this to his own bad behavior. He doesn’t vote, doesn’t know who he would vote for, and is mad at both parties when he thinks about politics.

In my experience unironic flat-earthers fall into two broad catagories, schitzophrenic nuerologically-diverse lumpenprole, and upper-middle class contrarians who latched onto it as a part of a part wider suite of conspiracy theories and new age woo. Astrology, Homeopathy, Crystal Healing, Second Shooter on the Grassy Knoll, Q-Anon, etc...

Meanwhile I've found that most of the "fiercely independent libertarians who believe in seeing things for themselves" who aren't also well to the left of Charles Murray's bell curve tend to work it out on thier own as they also tend to be travelers and consequentially end up having ties to the crunchier sides of the hiking, sailing, and general aviation communities.

In any case i think my point stands, as concepts go a flat vs spherical Earth has far more wide-reaching, and immediately observiable consequences than evolution vs young earth creationism, and that's well before we begin to consider specific claims about aryans' and indo-europeans' role in the bronze age collapse.

I think you are misrepresenting where people get their beliefs from. Most people don't look at any evidence for or against in some rational vacuum. We're just told what is and what isn't. Most of the time in a setting where we are completely incapable to question what's being said. This is true for the roundness of the earth and the 'leftist' theory of evolution. To compare and contrast two narratives that are believed in the same way on a basis that's irrelevant to why they were believed in the first place is missing the point of the comparison.

I think that's a big part of why flat earth guys can exist in the first place. Most people have no idea why they believe the earth is round and are completely incapable of defending their belief without appealing to a higher power. Same for the 'leftist' theory of evolution.

Outside of that, I'd argue that population differences are much more immediately obvious, like I said in my comment. It's very hard to get a good first hand look at the roundness of the earth or experience the curvature in action. But it's very easy to notice different phenotypic differences between population groups.

Fact of the matter is that population differences are just as real as the roundness of the earth. There is no wiggle room or 'softness' to this fact.

and to the degree that flat-eartherism exists today outside of a "birds aren't real"-esque joke it seems most prevalent amongst PMC types who, interacting with the world chiefly through screens, seem to have difficulty thinking in three dimensions.

This runs contrary to my experience, though brief, running through flat earth circles and debates. I found the most common character type to be working class dudes used to relying on their own senses and to a lesser extent belligerent basement dwellers. I'd find it very interesting if PMC types were going in on flat earth.

I think you are misrepresenting where people get their beliefs from.

Possibly but I am unconvinced. In all my years I have encountered a total of three unironic flat-earthers in the wild (that I am aware of) one of them was litterally a rando at the bar who would rant at length to anyone willing to listen (or unwilling for that matter) about Elon Musk and who certainly fell into the stereotype of "irreligious male of low socio-economic status". The other two were both upper middle class women one was some sort of health-care/social worker and the other worked in finance. My impression is that those two women are the sort of people who are actually watching all those flat-earther, q-anon, zietgiest, ancient aliens, videos and believing them.

I have a hunch that there's something going on with the female propensity towards secret knowledge, whisper networks, and true crime documentaries but i don't know.

I wasn't talking about where flat earthers get their beliefs from, but everyone.

The spherical nature of the Earth has been widely understood in the western world since classical antiquity, and to the degree that flat-eartherism exists today outside of a "birds aren't real"-esque joke it seems most prevalent amongst PMC types who, interacting with the world chiefly through screens, seem to have difficulty thinking in three dimensions.

IME Unironic flat eartherism is somewhat common among irreligious, generationally poor men. Usually as part of a complex of inconsistent theories and ideas.

Tucker Carlson appearing on Joe Rogan experience speculated that UAPs are real, but are not alien visitors from other planets but supernatural in origin and always has been here.

Honestly based.

Why are apparently cooky beliefs entertained by top influencers on the right?

The contemporary American right is an accident of history, an odd amalgamation of people that hold disparate and often mutually contradictory beliefs. So generalizing about them as a group is difficult. Nonetheless I speculate that there are (at least) two factors at play here:

  1. I believe there is a "religious temperament" that predisposes one to not only literal belief in the supernatural, but also anti-empiricism in general, more "speculative" modes of thinking, etc. An appreciable number of these people find themselves on the right for various reasons (the phrase "the religious right" exists for a reason).

  2. Leftism is the socially dominant ideology in elite culture, so the right naturally attracts contrarians who are attracted to odd ideas for their own sake.

anti-empiricism

What is "anti-empiricism"? And is this an example of it?

(If I can get some sleep and five goddamn minutes of peace, I'm still hoping to get some replies written to your recent posts on art, BTW. Keep up the great work.)

What is "anti-empiricism"?

It's a bit difficult to define, because the idea I had in mind is a loose federation of beliefs and attitudes, and doesn't really have any specific criteria. In terms of concrete beliefs though, I would say that the core of it would be something like an openness to entities and propositions that we don't (or can't) have direct empirical confirmation of, like God, souls, ghosts, UFOs, etc. In more rarefied territory, it would be an affinity for philosophical positions like: hostility to logical positivism, belief in abstract (non-spatiotemporal) objects, belief in non-naturalistic moral facts. But independent of any concrete beliefs about the existence or non-existence of specific entities, I think it's also a psychological disposition to see things as being suffused with meaning and significance.

And is this an example of it?

Not really. Lots of people are recalcitrant in the face of new evidence when it contradicts their deeply held beliefs. That's more of a human trait than a left-right trait. But, if someone just has an overriding commitment to making sure that children have access to puberty blockers for some reason, I don't think there's anything metaphysically there that doesn't fit into a purely materialist/naturalist worldview.

"Anti-empiricism" is in no way intended to be an insult of course. I personally have a strong anti-empirical streak.

I'm still hoping to get some replies written to your recent posts on art, BTW. Keep up the great work.

Thank you! I really appreciate that.

What is a "non-naturalistic moral fact"? Like categorical imperatives that aren't related to facts of the world?

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-non-naturalism/

Most often, ‘non-naturalism’ denotes the metaphysical thesis that moral properties exist and are not identical with or reducible to any natural property or properties in some interesting sense of ‘natural’.

Seems relevant that Tucker is a true believing Christian. UAPs being supernatural rather than extra-terrestrial, and demonic mauling/nuclear activity seems parsimonious with that.

I wouldn’t put Tucker in that bin. He said he bought after the demon attack a bible to read it (very slowly in a year) but that he is not coming from a tradition of faith and dislikes pastors.

Fair enough, my mistake.

Carlson isn’t particularly religious by conservative pundit standards. He’s a WASP Episcopalian who rarely if ever attends church.

Ultimately it’s about proximity to Pandora’s box.

Some people will gravitate towards it on the assumption that hope, too, lives within it–hope for a better understanding than what is available.

It’s natural that the chaotic nature of that source of knowledge will splinter into many different confusions, and to notice only the strangeness is to risk missing the point.

Is Pandora's box code for psychodelics or something?

Probably 90% of people in America (and higher internationally) believe in the supernatural to some degree. And when a person (like Tucker Carlson) is on air for hours every week, they are going to end up saying some wild shit. You would too.

Republicans and Democrats are not any different when it comes to their propensity to hold magical beliefs.

Have you every spoken to a liberal woman about astrology?

By no means am I suggesting that libs by-and-large aren't nuts too.

As much as Kamala Harris was criticized for not going on podcasts or sitting for interviews, stuff like this makes it clear that it was probably the right decision. Dealing with such criticism is probably better than dealing with the fallout of an unexpected gaffe. Trump can get away with this, because he's already demonstrated that nothing he says will faze his supporters, but conventional politicians don't have that luxury. Hell, Vance only has that luxury because he's joined at the hip with Trump. Doing the podcast circuit is the kind of thing fringe candidates like Andrew Yang do because it gets them airtime they don't have to pay for, and the exposure is worth the gaffe potential. Once you've already made major candidate status there's little upside and huge downside to going on a freewheeling 3-hour podcast where the conversation could go in any direction. Tucker Carlson can say shit like this because he isn't running for anything and nobody is poring over his every word looking for ammunition against him. Imagine what would happen if Tim Walz went on Rogan and said the same thing.

Reality caught up to his brand of professional counterculture. Now he’s got to keep chasing the dragon.

Also, people will pay him for it.

“Influencers” are the natural consequence of applying Tumblr-style incentives to legacy media personalities. Balkanization encourages specialization, and Tucker is sliding towards a passionate, dedicated, decoupled-from-reality audience.

I wonder if he got the idea from the Demon Core.

RationalWiki used to call this "crank magnetism": people who are receptive to one "crazy" opinion rarely limit themselves to just that. In other words, "don't be so open-minded your brain falls out". I'm not linking to RationalWiki, because it's RationalWiki.

Another way of framing it is that once you've established that conventional wisdom on some topic is wrong (perhaps even knowingly wrong i.e. the powers that be know what the truth is and are keeping it from you), it's only natural to wonder what other topics are so affected. To name but two people, Graham Linehan and Lionel Shriver have both admitted that realising the extent to which the mainstream lied to them about the transgender issue (as they see it) made them sceptical about whether climate change is real.

Why are apparently cooky beliefs entertained by top influencers on the right?

Zvi calls this the Incorrect Anti-Narrative Contrarian Cluster, and he's had a post about it in IOU status for nearly three years.

Part of the answer has got to be "the right is highly suspicious of running sanity gatekeeping, because all the institutions which were supposed to do that went rogue and abused their power to shut the right out of the conversation".

(Also, you mean "kooky".)

I have never met a person who can isolate the moment when nuclear technology became known to man.

I've never met Mr Carlson, but I could isolate several moments as potential candidates.


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